Font Forum

As a newcomer to Font Creator I can help but think that Open Type Designer needs better documentation. It is hardly covered in the manual. Most of what I know about it has come from the excellent forum posts in the Tutorials and Solutions section by Bhikkhu Pesala, thank you Bhikkhu.

However I think it could do with better coverage in the official documentation, particularly the very basic operation and capabilities.

There was just too much to do before release to add a lot of detailed documentation on the greatly improved OpenType designer before FontCreator 9 was released. Erwin is aware of the manual's shortcomings and as far as I know has plans to improve it. No doubt an update will follow when its ready with an updated manual.

The FontCreator 9.0 Help File is online and I have uploaded some Video Tutorials to my YouTube Channel.

None of them have any sound — use the Pause key to read the notes.

The most useful feedback would be to try adding OpenType features to your own fonts, and start threads in the FontCreator Support forum about difficulties that you came across. Then we will have a better idea of which areas require more explanation.

Bhikkhu's tutorials are excellent and his YouTube channel is extremely good.

However.

I still think that the official documentation could do with being a little more complete.

PJMiller wrote:I still think that the official documentation could do with being a little more complete.

However, what do you mean by “A little more complete?”

Did you follow the suggestion in my previous post?

I watched your videos.

I have worked through your example of adding stacking fractions to a font and that worked, sort of, I got to the point where I realised that it would work if I had suitable glyphs in my font.

I have added ligatures and discresionary ligatures, and kerning pairs (not using the Auto Kern).

But.

When I look at Gentium there are so many tables and so many features, it's difficult to know where to start. Open Type features can do so much and add so many different features to a font. There are even tables which select different characters dependent upon what language the operating system is using. I get the impression that I am only just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Just a list of what is and what is not possible with Open Type would be a good start.

For instance, what is a chaining context and what can I do with it?

Another thing is Anchors.

I followed your suggestion of looking at Times New Roman and I see that Anchors can be placed in glyphs and Diacritical marks can be positioned relative to a particular anchor in a glyph allowing for the position of the mark to be changed from one glyph to another.

But.

It's not obvious how to associate a mark with an anchor in open type designer, I tried it but it didn't work, the position of the mark was not being changed. Obviously I had missed something or done something wrong.

Perhaps the documentation for open type designer needs a discussion of the various open type features and how to do them. I realise that this would be a very large task. I think that open type designer could end up with an entire manual of it's own if this approach is adopted, but maybe that is what it needs.