Hello. Please find attached a glyph being developed for a Unicode proposal I am working on. It is that of the old Tamil fraction kaalviicam (கால்வீசம்) i.e. 1/64. I designed it in Inkscape by potracing an old printed glyph, rasterizing it at 600 dpi, had autotrace work out a centerline from it (outside Inkscape), touched up the resultant centerline to appear smooth and uniform with other glyphs, applied a stroke width, converted stroke to path, and exported to PDF and then imported into FC 6.5.
I am unable to apply the knife tool to cut it at all. Quite mysterious. All other glyphs designed this way are cuttable. This one however only alters the existing points somehow, but doesn’t cut it. Help please?!
kaalviicam.ttf (2.93 KB)
Make sure there are no self-intersecting contours.
I downloaded a copy of the sample font that you provided. Thank you for posting it.
I noticed that all three contours are in the wrong direction.
The following sequence of manual operations solves that problem.
View
Mode
Contour
Edit
Select All
Edit
Change Direction
The use of the following shows the location of the intersecting contours.
Font
Validate…
There is a cluster of seven points near that location. Deleting the off-curve point at the far right seems to solve the problem.
I notice that the sample font has only one printable glyph and that that glyph is beyond the range U+0021 through to U+007E. I have found that a font without a printable glyph in the range U+0021 through to U+007E can produce strange problems with some application programs. For example, I once found it necessary to use a glyph from the range U+0021 through to U+007E in a pdf where I did noy really need a glyph from the range U+0021 through to U+007E in the pdf, as if the pdf-producing part of the application package needed such a glyph to be present for some reason. Maybe that was older software some years ago, and maybe whatever software you are using does not have that problem, yet I mention that experience just in case you might think it a good idea to add something like a full stop character into any sample fonts, just in case problems arise and the availability of the full stop character might be helpful.
I hope that this helps.
Your research is very interesting.
William Overington
6 June 2012
Hi and thanks for this. I can now cut it. But really if I am trying to use the knife on overlapping/intersection contours it throws me an error. If cutting self-intersecting contours is also not allowed, then the app should throw me an error instead of arbitrarily adding some points. Please fix this behaviour. Thank you!
Hey William, thanks for the trouble, but I already can change directions by right-clicking on the contours. I still am not finished with the font yet and will do all these finalizing stuff to comply with validation before releasing my glyphs for public use.
There is a cluster of seven points near that location. Deleting the off-curve point at the far right seems to solve the problem.
I deleted all but the on-curve on the far left. They are useless points generated by automatic conversion from EPS.
I notice that the sample font has only one printable glyph and that that glyph is beyond the range U+0021 through to U+007E. I have found that a font without a printable glyph in the range U+0021 through to U+007E can produce strange problems with some application programs.
As said, this is a work in progress, and I will actually be submitting these glyphs to Lohit Tamil (https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/) as a contribution under the OFL, so that’ll take care of that. Thank you for notifying me of this.
Your research is very interesting.
Thanks for your interest. Tamil has fractions down upto 1/320, and a host of symbols too. I’ll post more on this later on.
They must have been there within the original source image. Nothing FontCreator can do about it right now. Do take a closer look at the EPS/PDF to confirm this.
You’re right, I’m sorry. My intention was not finding fault with FC. By examining the original SVG (before conversion to PDF) I find that for some reason the stroke to path operation in Inkscape causes three close-by points to be created, which become seven when auto-converted from cubic to quadratic by FC.
BTW can you please tell me whether PDFs can contain quadratic outlines? (You know about my other thread.)