Question from Newbie

FontCreator - Font Editor FontCreator - Support
1

:blush: Please forgive me my ignorance, but I am under a great deal of pressure (time) and have to learn FontCreator very quickly. The manual and guides, although chock full of information, do not always explain why you would do something (or not) or what certain codes mean (to a non-programmer!), so if some kind person could help, I would be so grateful!

My brief: design symbols for a specific purpose.

After some consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the font must be: a symbol font (don’t want spell-checking) and mono-spaced.
It is also highly desirable that the main symbols are connected to specific keyboard characters so that an experienced user can just type them into a word processor either as symbols or that text which has been typed into eg notepad, can be pasted in and reformatted by selecting this font.

My problem: when I start a new symbols font, the postscript names are blank, so I have no idea which glyph will relate to which keyboard character - what I am not sure about is, do the codes which will display (eg glyph index or microsoft mappings) relate to specific keyboard characters? If so, how can I know which is which without also having an ordinary font open open at the same time so that I can keep comparing them?

2

I just thought I’d add what is really confusing me…

When the new font is set up, if I right click on a glyph and select Properties, then Mapping, then click on Add, I’m told a character is already mapped to this glyph, but it doesn’t tell me which one… and the Unicode Block (whatever that is!) is ‘Private Use Area’, so no information there either! If I delete the mapping, then the Selection defaults to Basic Latin in the Unicode Block list… so I still don’t know whether a unicode value has a specific keyboard meaning.

I want to make it so that if someone hits, eg a lower case g they get a particular symbol, whichever keyboard they are using, in the same way that they would get a g if they had Ariel selected and hit the g.

Sorry to be so daft - I just need to get a handle on this before I go down too many blind alleys!

Thanks for reading.

3

Hi fflei,

This is a very good question. There is no need to change the mappings, so don’t worry about them.

When you create a new symbol font and the font overview window shows a grid with 16 columns, this symbol to character table might help.

Use this info at your own risk!
I’m positive the ASCII character set (the green cells) is always the same on every Windows computer, but I’m not so sure about the remaining characters as those probably depend on your systems codepage. So do let me know if this works.

About ASCII:

  • ASCII contains 128 characters. See http://www.asciitable.com/
    There are only 95 printing characters and they should all be visible (except for the space character) unless the font has invalid mappings.
    The printing characters, starting with a space:
    !"#$%&()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~
4

You may find these threads useful:

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/dealing-in-symbols/1408/1 Dealing in Symbols

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/use-or-purpose-of-symbol-platform/954/1 Use or Purpose of Symbol Platform

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/converting-normal-font-to-symbolic/347/1 Converting normal font to symbolic

From the FC Manual:
I. Settings - Ranges - Code Page Character Range:
This field is used to specify the code pages encompassed by the font file in the mappings for the Microsoft platform. If the Microsoft platform is Microsoft Symbol, then the Symbol Character Set should be selected.

If a code page is selected then the code page is considered functional. The determination of “functional” is left up to the font designer, although character set selection should attempt to be functional by code pages if at all possible.

Note: Symbol character sets have a special meaning. If the Symbol Character Set is selected, and the font file contains a Microsoft Symbol platform, then all of the characters in the Unicode range 0xF000 - 0xF0FF (inclusive) will be used to enumerate the symbol character set. If this code page is not selected, any characters present in that range will not be enumerated as a symbol character set.



II. Unicode versus Symbol:
“When a font has a Microsoft Unicode BMP only platform, the font is a normal font. When a font has a Microsoft Symbol platform, the font is a Symbol font.

Symbol character sets have a special meaning: all of the characters in the Unicode range 0xF000 - 0xF0FF (inclusive) will be used to enumerate the symbol character set. All glyphs in this range are mapped to the range 0x0000 - 0x00FF.

Symbol fonts do not form words so line breaks can occur after any character code. A spell checker should not check symbol font-formatted material.

Note: only the first 224 characters of symbol fonts will be accessible, a space and up to 223 printing characters.

III. From Symbol to Unicode
In order to change a symbol font into a normal font there are a few things:
• Make sure the Microsoft platform is “Microsoft Unicode BMP only”.

From the Platform Manager command (Format menu) select the Microsoft platform. Now press the Change button. The platform should be changed from “Microsoft Symbol” to “Microsoft Unicode BMP only”.
• In the Settings command (Format menu) on the Classification tab set the PANOSE - Family Kind from “Pictorial” to something appropriate and the Font-family - Class from “Symbolic” to something that suits the fonts style.
• In the Settings command (Format menu) on the Ranges tab change the Code Page Character Ranges (if available). Unselect “Symbol Character Set” and select the appropriate ranges.

IV. From Unicode to Symbol
In order to change a normal font into a symbol font there are a few things:
• Make sure the Microsoft platform is “Microsoft Symbol”.

From the Platform Manager command (Format menu) select the Microsoft platform. Now press the Change button. The platform should be changed from “Microsoft Unicode BMP only” to “Microsoft Symbol”.
• In the Settings window (Format menu) on the Classification tab set the PANOSE - Family Kind to “Pictorial”, PANOSE - Weight to “No Fit”, PANOSE - Contrast to “No Fit” and the Font-family - Class to “Symbolic”.
• In the Settings window (Format menu) on the Ranges tab no Unicode Character Ranges should be selected and Symbol Character Set should be the only selected Code Page Range.”

In general, I would suggest to stay away from symbol. Just use “New Font,” and the mapping is all done for you. Remembering the normal keyboard allows you to type your symbols.

5

Hi Erwin,

Thank you very much - this is really helpful!

Now that I know which is which I can get on with the real task!

Just a couple of small points though, and I hope you’ll forgive me for tacking them onto this reply rather than posting in another part of the forum, but they’re relevant to this.

First, the number of columns in a font overview window depends on the size of the window - for instance, the first new font I started had 15 columns, but a full-screen window (19" at 1280 x 1024) has 19, so in order not to get in a muddle with the table, it’s a good idea to resize the window!

I just wondered whether there could be an option to load a sort of default postscript name for the caption? I suspect that the thinking behind this is that symbol fonts are not letters of the alphabet, therefore calling them aAbB etc is not relevant and the postscript names of a symbol font should be descriptive of the symbol (as in Wingdings etc), so users must invent their own. But it would be really, really useful to be able to relate a glyph cell to a key in the same way as a ‘normal’ font.

I can see why ghostly letters would not be possible, unless you could just load in the relevant letters from a normal font, but could you have an option to have the default postscript names which relate to the keys? They can, after all, be edited.

Thanks again for the map! :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

6

Hi Dave,

Some very useful information here.

Believe it or not, I had read the manual about symbol v normal! But I was slipping out of my depth in the technicalities!

Everyone I have spoken to has said that symbol fonts should be avoided, but I don’t have a choice because the font will be used with a piece of software which geared up to dealing with a 244 character symbol font. Also, it must be safe from spell checking.

I have looked at the possibilty of designing a normal font, and then converting it, which would overcome the mapping mysteries, but because I wasn’t sure what mapped to what in the symbols, I didn’t want to design glyphs which would be discarded in the conversion process because they’d been put in areas which would not convert…

Thanks again :smiley:

7

Yes, either resize the window, or change the cell size (or do both).

Right now the Glyph caption can show the postscript name, a mapping or the glyph index. It might be a good idea to add a new Glyph Caption: “Symbol Character”.

8

Right now the Glyph caption can show the postscript name, a mapping or the glyph index. It might be a good idea to add a new Glyph Caption: “Symbol Character”.

:smiley: Yes, absolutely. The problem with the postscript name is that with a symbol font you have to enter one before it can display, which brings me back to the original problem, that I didn’t know what to call it because I didn’t know which character it was linked to, so having a symbol character option would solve all of that in one go. :smiley:

9

Right-click on the Glyph Overview, and select, Caption, Macintosh mapping. This will show you the captions for the key used to type each symbol. You can copy the postscript names from any standard font, at least for the ASCII character set.

  • Select glyphs from ! to ~ in the standard font
  • Switch to the ! mark in the symbol font
  • Paste Special (Control E)
  • Uncheck all boxes except “Postscript Names”
10

Thanks for this - I got there in the end, but not in quite the way you described!

Macintosh mapping shows me codes like $0041 (Cap A), which doesn’t mean anything to me! But after I selected and then special-pasted to the new, as yet glyphless, font, and then changed the caption to Postscript, the key captions were there, which is brilliant.

And those characters which still don’t have captions cannot be accessed directly from the keyboard anyway? That these would have to be got from an ‘Insert Symbol’ command or from the Character Map? … actually, I just tried something in Word with an existing font… if you use the shortcut like ctrl and ’ and then type an e you get the equivalent character to the e-acute-accent

Steep learning curve, but it’s going to be fun - thanks for your help, I’m sure I’ll be back!

11

Duh! I had never considered that there was any structure to Symbol Fonts.

I just opened a new blank font and clicked the Symbol character set/OK, then selected Format/Mapping … and it is all laid out. Glyphs S 0000 - S 00E1 (225) ending in $ F0FF.

Of course there HAS to be a structure!

Thanks fflei, without your questions, I would never have bothered to look.

12

A thought that probably doesn’t add much to the facts gone before.

Begin the font as an alphabetic font (Microsoft Unicode BMP platform). Make sure the PostScript names are generated. You would then know what the keys were going to be. Make sure there is a Macintosh platform also – it will keep the PostScript names around during all this.

When done, change the platform to Microsoft Symbol. Change all the Fonts Settings values appropriately (Classification - PANOSE, Metrics, Ranges). Check the size of the .notdef character as on Symbol fonts it may dictate the vertical size (ascender) of the font.

You must Autoname the new platform to get the font naming fields corrected.

There are quite a few fonts running around where the platform is not straight. They seem to work.

imho… Dick