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How the keyboard is mapped to the characters?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 2:05 pm
by JK44
Can someone explain how the way the keyboard is mapped to the characters? I am trying out Font Creator Home edition. I hope someone can help with this. I am trying to make it so that with the Cntrl plus "A" keys I can type out caps A in one font, Cntrl plus "B" keys to give caps B etc.... and Shift plus "A" to give the caps A in a different font, Shift plus "B" to give caps B etc... for the rest of the whole alphabet using those existing fonts/glyphs. Perhaps by copying characters from one font and another font to form eg. font1+font2 in one font file all mapped to the keyboard. Can I do this with Font Creator, and if so how?

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 3:07 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
You cannot do any keyboard mapping with FontCreator, but you can mix the glyphs from several fonts in one font and map them to different codepoints. You do not have to follow the Unicode standard, though there are good reasons for doing so if you can.

First, you need to decide in which applications this font must work. If you want it to work only in Word, for example, then Word has plenty of options for remapping the keyboard. If you want it to work in all applications, then your options are limited.

One method that might work for your problem is to make a set of four typestyles: regular, bold, italic, and bold italic, and use the different typestyles to switch to different glyph designs within the same font. This is what I did with this set of Burmese fonts:
Win Innwa.GIF
Win Innwa.GIF (25.77 KiB) Viewed 4098 times
The regular Burmese uses the regular typestyle, the bold Burmese uses the Bold typestyle, the matching English font uses italic, and I also used bold italic for bold English letters.

I recommend keeping all the glyphs in a single font if possible. Switching fonts with keyboard macros is not very convenient. Switching from regular to bold or italic is not too difficult, and will work in most Windows applications. Unless you limit yourself to a customized keyboard in Word, however, a single font is going to be difficult to type with.

combine fonts into one font and map to codepoints

Posted: Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:06 pm
by JK44
Thank you for letting me know about this. Using Font Creator Home edition (not pro), how do I go about combining a few different fonts as you have described and then mapping them to codepoints. Is it a cut and paste procedure after opening the fonts you want to work with? Would you be able to guide me through such a procedure?