After many years of hand-lettering for a living, I am excited to find that my old profession isn’t really as endangered as I thought. Making fonts is too much fun and FCP is pleasantly easy to work with. I’ve made about twenty (fonts) so far, upper/lowercase, numbers & basic punctuation. Also a few dingbats occupying such positions as < and >{, etc. Everything has been working fine, except that the single quote character will not print when typed in CorelDraw or MS Word. The apostrophe works fine in the test window, and prints from there. It also works fine in the display window in the font management program I use to load the fonts for testing kerning results (X-fonter) or for temporary use.
I have not used CorelDraw, however I have used Microsoft Word and CorelDraw may be doing the same thing as Microsoft Word.
Microsoft Word substitutes smart quotes for the simple single quote and double quote characters.
That is instead of " one gets characters for the 66 and 99 style of quote characters used in handwriting and printed books and instead of ’ one gets characters for the 6 and 9 style of quote characters used in handwriting and printed books .
However, the font being used needs to contain glyphs for those characters.
If one starts Font Creator 5.0 and starts a new font, then preadded places for the four smart quotes that are needed for English, namely a 66 style quote, a 99 style quote, a 6 style quote and a 9 style quote are to be found at row 15 column 12 and row 16 colums 1, 2 and 3.
If glyphs for those four are drawn, then the font will have the correct glyphs when Word carries out the substitution.
I use Microsoft WordPad for testing the ordinary quote and double quote characters, as, at least on the Windows 98 machine which I am using, WordPad does not substitute smart quotes.
In Corel, you need to find this option: (a check box before the following), “Change Straight Quotes to Typographic Quotes”.
Make sure that box is unchecked.
If using version 8 & above, look in Tools\Options\Text\Type Assist.
And if using v7, it’s just Tools\Options\Type Assist.
Both suggestions were quite helpful, as was a PM from Bhikkhu Pesala, who endeavored to tip me off concerning my missplaced post. I recieved the two responses before I read the PM Thanks to all for a super fast and accurate answer to my post.
Thanks to all for a super fast and accurate answer to my post.