Fonts generated by FontCreator have a great problem

break_apart · Post by **break_apart** » Fri May 11, 2007 9:48 am

Fonts generated by FontCreator have a great problem which fonts generated by other font making programs may not have.

The problem is that if a font generated by FontCreator contains characters which have a negative left side bearing in order to combine two or more characters, the font will not work correctly with Internet Explorer. In Internet Explorer one space comes after the characters which have a negative left side bearing. Sometimes the characters which have a negative left side bearing just break from the character it should combine. This problem destroys the look of my webpage composition. In IE words containing characters which have a negative left side bearing look broken.

Someone may tell me it is not a problem of fontcreator but problems of IE. But I find that my competitor's fonts(same language and structure as mine) that generated by FontLab or Fontographer work fine with IE and don't have this problem. So I urge your programmers of FontCreator tell me how to solve this problem in order to prove your software is as well as FontLab or Fontographer.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Fri May 11, 2007 11:09 am

I am not able to reproduce this problem.

The accented letters on this page are created using combining diacritical marks. They display correctly in both Opera and Internet Explorer.

Are you sure that you have set the advance width to zero, as well as setting the negative left side-bearings?

Can we get your font to test it?

Erwin Denissen · Post by **Erwin Denissen** » Fri May 11, 2007 11:14 am

On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Font tab. Make sure "Set left side bearing point at x=0" is not enabled. Do let us know if this solves the problem.

break_apart · Post by **break_apart** » Fri May 11, 2007 2:31 pm

Thanks for help me to solve this problem! I tried the method but the problem is not solved. I made a simply test font that contains only four characters--two basic characters and two tone marks. The problem is the tone marks. I also made a simply test webpage to show the problem. I will send the test font, the test webpage and a screen print of the problem. I hope this can help to solve the problem and make FontCreator better.

Please first install the font and open the test webpage. My IE version is 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2. I think most people use this version of IE.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Fri May 11, 2007 3:20 pm

I tested the font with the same result in IE 7, which required the Simplified Chinese language pack to be installed.

Opera renders the test page without any line breaks or spaces.
It looks like an HTML coding problem to me.

Erwin Denissen · Post by **Erwin Denissen** » Fri May 11, 2007 3:36 pm

Thanks for sending the files.

I can't find any problems within the font file. Can you send/ show me a font that does work with IE6/7?

break_apart · Post by **break_apart** » Sun May 13, 2007 11:50 am

I do know there are many fonts that contain characters which have a negative left side bearing in order to combine two or more characters, and these fonts work well in IE. I made a test page of Tahoma font that contains Thai characters. This font works well in IE.

FontCreator is a Windows based program, so I believe the font generated by FontCreator should work well in Windows. IE plays a key role in Windows system and is used by most people who use windows system. If fonts generated by FontCreator cannot work well in IE, what a pity!

I will send you the font and test page soon. Thanks for you effort to solve this problem!

Erwin Denissen · Post by **Erwin Denissen** » Sun May 13, 2007 5:43 pm

I still don't know what is going on, but I guess it's a bug within IE. If you take a copy of a font that does work with IE and keep removing a couple of glyphs, at one point the font also fails to correctly display the combining diacritical marks. Hope this helps.

Joop Jagers · Post by **Joop Jagers** » Mon May 14, 2007 8:33 am

I remember having this kind of problem too. In my experience it is NOT a FontCreator issue. In my case the problem was caused by glyphs which had a zero advance width. Setting the advance width to, say, 5 units makes hardly any visual difference. I hope this solves your problem.

break_apart · Post by **break_apart** » Tue May 15, 2007 5:14 am

Thank Joop. Setting the advence width can solve this problem, but I find that the advence width must be set to a bigger number(at least 20 or 30 in case of font size is below 18px) to solve this problem. But there is a new problem. In some languages one character have two tone marks, one under the character and one upon it. Because of the advence width, the two tone marks cannot be aligned.

The fact is that some fonts without setting the advence width don't have this problem and they are not generated by FontCreator. The fonts generated by FontCreator have this problem. It is may be a bug of IE, but some font making program/person found a way to solve it without setting the advence width and don't cause new problem. So I just hope FontCreator also can do this.