Newbie having problem with just about everything!

Golnoush Ackert · Post by **Golnoush Ackert** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 5:12 am

This is the first time I have ever had to do anything like this in my life, so, please forgive me if I sound totally ignorant and stupid!!
1-

I created my first font after several hours of struggle!!: q with a caron (on top), and Q with caron (on top) and LOOKS BEAUTIFUL!

, BUT can't seem to go any further! I should explain that I need to add them to the Arial font in the Finale/Baltic (Windows XP). Will be using them (and several similiar composite letters already existing in Arial Baltic Script, in Font Creator and Word Latin Extended-A,) to input Persian lyrics in musical scores. They have to appear in the lower 255 characters of Arial to be recognized by Finale.
1- Finale does not support Unicode. I assume I have to use a Microsoft Platform to be able to use them in Finale. But which one?
2- I would like to name Q: Capital Letter Farsi Ein with Caron, and q Small Letter Farsi ein with Caron. But in Glyph Edit Window they both appear with the same name! Capital Letter Farsi Ein with Caron.ttf or Small Letter Farsi Ein with Caron.ttf! Shouldn't they be called differently? The same thing happens in the Arial font window. They are both called Arial qcaron! Eventhough their names in the individual Glyph is correct!

3- In Naming window, Microsoft Unicode was automatically filled in by the program, I added Microsoft Symbol and typed in the same info as in the Unicode. Thought perhaps that might help. Since in the Help it says Microsoft requires the same info. But still couldn't test (It says: Font not valid, make sure all required Microsoft Naming Fields are available! I tried to name the font Arial Farsi to make it different from Arial. That didn't help either.
4- Tried to install, it says: In order to install the font you must first save the font. Do you want to save the file C:\Program Files\High-Logic\Font Creater Program\Capital Letter Farsi Ein.ttf?) In the case of both the small letter and the Capital letter!! Well, I did that with the Capital letter Q, I get a message: The font is already installed, you should remove the old version through Windows Font Folder. I thought I'm just adding couple of missing composite letters to Arial! I probably have misunderstood something essential about this process all together!
5- I tried to print the fonts. Appeared huge on the page and not filled in (unlike its image in the Edit Window)!
6- Character to Glyph index Mappings, again the program, in Glyph and Mapping windows, automatically called: Q $0000 (NULL) and q $0001 (START OF HEADING). Is this supposed to be? What does it mean?
7- Once this is all done, could I just have all the composite letters gathered in the first 255 letters of Arial Western, so I don't have to jump around to Baltic?
Sorry for being so wordy! Please help me so far! I'm sure I'll be back with more questions!! Thanks a million!

Dave Crosby · Post by **Dave Crosby** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 2:04 pm

WOW! Your starting point is MILES ahead of mine! I got to start in the "baby crawling" part of the race.
I can see your need. Is this part of your job? It sounds like an interesting project.
There are some very knowledgeable people in this forum [sorry I'm not one of them

But] they will be stopping by. Best of Luck!!

Golnoush Ackert · Post by **Golnoush Ackert** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 3:30 pm

Hi Dave, Thanks for the reply. It's very encouraging. I have been feeling very inadequate and frusterated. In response to your question: I am preparing 3 volumes of piano music for publication, written based on Persian classical and folk music. One of them is mostly arrangement of children songs (similiar to the American nursery rhymes). It's for this one that I need to include lyrics. As you probably know, Persian is written from right to left, so, we need to use the Western alphabet to input lyrics. And we do have some letters that do not exist in the English language, for which we have developed certain composite letters. Hence, my interest in Font Creater. Hope I get some help. Have a good day!

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 3:43 pm

Your explanation is too long and complex to follow. It does sound as if you are making the job far harder than it needs to be. I don't know Farsi, so have used the Latin letters Q and q with caron accent. I hope it will be enough to illustrate.

First I deleted a whole lot of glyphs from Arial, just to make the file smaller.

Then I edited the Capital Letter Thorn and Lower case letter Thorn, which are both in the first 256 ANSI character set and so should be recognised by Finale. To type them I had to use Alter 222, and Alter 254. You may choose to remap different unwanted characters that are easy to type in Finale.

In each glyph edit window for thorn, I deleted the existing character with the "make empty" eraser button and inserted glyph Q and glyph ˇ (Caron) to make a composite character. Similarly for q and ˇ.

From the Tools menu, Autonaming, I renamed the Font as Arial Farsi

From the File menu, I saved the Truetype font file in C:\My Fonts as ARIAL2.TTF

I installed the font and tested it in Wordpad

Font test in Wordpad which worked fine.

Arial Farsi is here for you to look at.

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Fri Mar 05, 2004 4:40 pm

Welcome to the wonder world of fonts. I don't know all the answers to your query, but I do know some pieces that may start you off easier.

1. You add characters or glyphs to font sets and not individually as I read. Open the font you wish to deal with (Arial here) into FCP. There is a True Type version and an Open Type version. The TT has 220 glyphs while the OT 1320. The OT is probably installed but the TT is easier to work with.

I immediately do a "Save As" with a rename so I don't mess up the original. Eventually you would have to change the internal font names (Format/Naming) so as to differentiate from the authorized Arial.

2. Insert two new blank glyphs and copy/paste your curves therein.

Since you're asking for already designed pieces (caron and Qq), it would be trivial and a 2 minute job to build composite glyphs composed of a q, a Q and a caron. This solves the problem of the glyphs being badly sized and slightly wrong. You don't have to change the platform either.

3. Naming them via "Properties" is getting to the cusp of my knowledge. Since Qcaron or qcaron or Latin Capital Letter Q with Caron or Latin Small Letter Q with Caron (hacek) don't show in my 15,000 list of characters, I don't have a precedent for names/codes.

What I would do, but I can't prove it entirely works, is assign a postscript name Qcaron/qcaron and then go find some other character you can use for mapping. In my TT Arial trial, I used Acaron/0461/01CD and acaron/0462/01CE which are not in the TT Arial. (See Bhikkhu Pesala message for others). The pairs of numbers are decimal/hexadecimal equivalents. They show on the Preview window. Read the manual on how to insert these to the preview text.

4. Save the font (under the new name).

5. Go install your new font and test your application.

My understanding of the process ran out a few points above, so I may be wrong about some of this ... as excuse, I don't use diacritically-loaded letters so don't know how to access them in applications... But just now I put together a TT Arial with qcaron and Qcaron and can see them in FCP.

Others can audit my work and/or give the correct answers (see Bhikkhu Pesala message)!

Dick

Yehuda · Post by **Yehuda** » Sat Mar 06, 2004 7:29 pm

I think Bhikkhu Pesala covered the essential points. Dick Pape's post was almost correct, except for the glyph-naming part.

A postscript name is not essential, but you could use Qcaron and qcaron.

The important thing is the mapping. Don't use something like Acaron. As Bhikkhu suggested, use a standard ANSI mapping (one with a character code below 00FF) which you don't need. The names given to the codes are the Unicode values, which is what you would want if you were making a Unicode-compliant font. However, since (like a lot of software) the program you're using isn't Unicode-compliant, the character name is meaningless.

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 12:21 am

I bow to the superior knowledge! Good thing I said I was already at my cusp!! Of course, Postscript names are for us, not the computers.

However: to test out the rest of my answer, I drew the Qcaron glyph and named it. I put the hex character code (01CD) into fcppreview.txt and could see it when I did a Font Test in FCP -- so a connection WAS made. I didn't install it or confirm anything.

Why wouldn't that assignment work in any instance where you could enter a hex value? What is the advantage/need of using an existing position lower than 00FF?

Thanks, Dick.

Golnoush Ackert · Post by **Golnoush Ackert** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 4:49 am

Hello Bhikkhu, Dick and Jehuda and thank you for your help. I sure appreciate your input.
I finally have some time to deal with this issue. I have created the Q (q) with macron, named and saved (C:\My Fonts\Arial2.ttf) and installed them. I can see them in Windows as well as Finale's Fonts list and they tested fine in both.

Thank you all. I figured out the corresponding nos. in Options/Overview/ Microsoft Mappings. I also changed the name from Thorn to Qcaron (for Caption), but in the Properties/Mappings it still says Latin Capital Letter Thorn. Where do I change it?
1) Does it matter which Microsoft Platform I use?
2) There are many unneeded characters in Arial. I would like to keep only the ones used for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Farsi. They need to be in the 1st 255. What is the best way to reposition glyghs? Should I use sorting? I got scared because it sayed it's undoable!

3) What is Macintosh standard order names? (I think the Manual needs a good cross reference index.
By the way, where is the poll? I saw it once somewhere in the Forum, but I can't find it again! I'd like to vote. This is certainly a great program, and so much fun!! Thanks again, Golnoush

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 5:21 am

In this same Support category, Dave Crosby references the CNet review site: http://www.download.com/ which allows user comments and ratings about Font Creator.

When you get to that page, use their Search function for Font Creator. It will bring it to the top of a page and show **14** reviews (up from 11!) with 71% favorable!! Good work Dave!!!

Enter good words only and don't forget to vote with 5's ...

Dick

Yehuda · Post by **Yehuda** » Mon Mar 08, 2004 3:09 pm

but in the Properties/Mappings it still says Latin Capital Letter Thorn. Where do I change it?

You don't. "Latin Capital Letter Thorn" is the Unicode name for the mapping Hex00DE (or decimal 222). If you want your character mapped to that code, it will show as "Latin Capital Letter Thorn". This is the consequence of creating a non-Unicode-compliant text font. (I use a Hebrew word processor which uses its own proprietary mapping of characters, so (aside from punctuation and numerals in the lower ASCII range) all the characters have Unicode mapping names which do not reflect what the characters are.)

Does it matter which Microsoft Platform I use?

My understanding is that it's considered proper to use "Microsoft Unicode" for text fonts and "Microsoft Symbol" for non-text. In "Microsoft Symbol" fonts, the mappings are F000 hex higher than in text fonts -- if you look at a font like the standard Symbol font that comes with Windows you'll see what I mean. If you change the platform to "Microsoft Symbol", the mappings will be changed. You're probably better off leaving the font as a "Microsoft Unicode" font (obviously a misnomer in this case).

Finally, to answer a question Dick Pape asked:

What is the advantage/need of using an existing position lower than 00FF?

In the original post, Golnoush said that the program for which this is being created only accepts values up to 00FF (i.e. ANSI, or extended ASCII, values). There are quite a few programs like that out there.

Golnoush Ackert · Post by **Golnoush Ackert** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 5:12 am

Hello, You are not going to believe this. I am ready to hang myself! This morning I happily continued working on my new font: rempapped all the needed characters, got rid of a lot of unnecessary ones (reduced the size to 117 KB) and was really proud of myself! Alas, I can not install it!! Everytime, it tells me that it's already installed. It copies it to the Windows fonts folder but none of the programs can see it! There is a little arrow in front of the name. I don't know if it means anything. I try to delete it in the fonts window, it does not delete. It also says that the font name is not valid! I have searched everywhere to delete the older versions. I just don't know what's happening. I have followed the same instructions Bhikkhu gave that worked before, but nothing works. Is there some secret place in the registry that the fonts hide themselves and laugh at us? It's midnight and I've worked all day and I'm exhausted. Hopefully by tomorrow one of you kind souls will have a solution. Could it be that the file is corrupt? I take back everything good I said before. This is Hell!

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 12:49 pm

Sorry.

I hope you voted before last night ...

Golnoush Ackert · Post by **Golnoush Ackert** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 4:12 pm

Hi Dick, Don't just say SORRY! Help Me! I still think it's a great program and I WILL vote positively. I'm just frustrated specially since everything was working so well. It must have been beginner's luck. My knowledge of computers is limited to programs I have worked with. I'm no techie by any means. I'm sure if I were, I would know what to do right away. So, PLEASE help me if you can. Anyone else out there??????

Erwin Denissen · Post by **Erwin Denissen** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 8:55 pm

Maybe there is a problem with other fonts already installed on your system. Try the Fix Font Folder utility available from our download page.
http://www.high-logic.com/download.html

How to use it:
- Start Fifofo.exe
- Press the Ok button at the bottom of the "Read Me" Window.
- Press "Fix Fonts Folder"
- wait, wait, wait......until you see a list of fonts.
- Press "Save Report..." and select a filename
- As a final step a restart might help

Send this file and the font file to me so I can try and help you with the problem.

Erwin Denissen · Post by **Erwin Denissen** » Tue Mar 09, 2004 11:12 pm

Thanks for sending the font file to me.

The font has both Microsoft Unicode and Microsoft Symbol platforms. A font should have only one Microsoft platform. I suggest you remove the Microsoft Symbol platform.