New font based on existing font - preserve kerning etc.

alban1 · Post by **alban1** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 1:21 pm

I often need to type the letter H with macron in Powerpoint slides (to mean the antihydrogen atom). The modifying letters in Unicode don't seem to work well with capital letters. So I looked for a font editing software and stumbled upon this "Font Creator". Looks nice guys!

I set out to make a new font containing only the new character, based on the MS Arial Unicode font. I kept only the letter H and modified it with a bar over it, then I emptied all other characters. I do want to retain the letter spacing with respect to the other letters. The following two questions have come up:

1) The letter H part of the new character looks different than H in the orinal font, particularly at low resolutions. Why is that so and can I do something about it?

2) The new font file is still over 300 kB in size. Can I erase some characters that are no longer needed without losing the character spacing information with respect to all those characters?

Thanks a lot
Alban

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:42 pm

1. If you create your new character by cutting and pasting outlines, you will lose any hinting information in the font, which is why it looks poor at low resolutions. Since you want to use it in Powerpoint this is important.

Font Creator doesn't yet add hinting information. What you wust do is create a composite character, then the hinting information will not be lost unless you edit the original h and macron glyphs.

Create an empty glyph.

Select the h and the macron in the overview window, and copy them to the clipboard

Paste them into your new empty glyph to create a composite character h macron.

Adjust the position of the macron

Map the character. I don't see any H macron in Unicode. U+0126 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH STROKE is there. (Hbar decimal 294) Perhaps you could replace this with H macron. The bar goes through the stem of the h and H rather than over the top of the letter.

2. The size of the font is unimportant, but you could erase Arabic and Hebrew, etc., if you really want to. If you delete the other characters, you will lose the kerning information associated with them. Why would you want to do this anyway? Use the new font for the whole text instead of Arial, then there is no need to switch fonts to type the h macron.

I managed to do this and reduced the file size to 115K. You can take a look here, and modify as you need, or start over.

New Arial with H macron (H bar)

alban1 · Post by **alban1** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 4:55 pm

Hello Bhikkhu and thanks for your reply. I will try out your suggestion soon. I guess I should have started with Arial as opposed to Arial Unicode, because my only reason for using the Unicode version was access to the combining macron, which didn't work.

How is the kerning information stored? Is it accessible and editable via FCP? There are 2 reasons why I created a new font rather than adding a character to an existing font:

1) I can freely distribute a (small) font file to my colleagues

2) Being the lazy person I am, I want to place the new character in the place of H. I may eventually add other letters (like p with macron), so that makes it easier to remember where they are.

Alban

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 5:17 pm

Hello Alban - welcome to Font Creator. (Now Go Vote!)

You are interested in only 1 character so it might be better to add it to a symbol font (Wingdings, dingbats or something you use). It would pick up their characteristics and would be readily available to any application using standard application (Microsoft) procedures.

You don't need to mess with character mapping if you use an existing symbol glyph. I would use FCP Format/Naming to change the internal font names (font name and font family name) to something you recognize which is different from the vendor's name.

You could copy an H and a Macron from Arial and paste them in the symbol font over some existing glyph you don't need. Remember where you put it so you can find it again. You would only need to move the macron into position over the H.

I tested this in Font Creator (F5) and it looks correct in Wingdings -- the right relative size and all. I allowed FCP to install in in C:\Windows\Fonts under a different name (see Naming) and could see the character in MS Word and Powerpoint (Insert/Symbol). It is displayed properly. Since it was in a separate font I could change the relative size of it without affecting my text font.

I suppose you could delete all glyphs except the one you are interested in to reduce the file size however the Wingdings font is only 61kb. (I deleted all but 5, installed and got a fatal Powerpoint error! Became 6kb but wouldn't run. Oh well.)

It seems to be one way.

Dick

vanisaac · Post by **vanisaac** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 6:58 pm

I've got to ask you if there are other alphabetic symbols that you use like H with overbar for antiparticles and the like. This sounds like something that should be in Unicode, but I can't find it anywhere in the codecharts of v4.0

alban1 · Post by **alban1** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 7:08 pm

Yes, there is a large number of antiparticles that are denoted like this. I guess this should be done with U+0304 (Combining Macron) or U+0305 (Combining Overline). However, it doesn't work for capital letters. Go ahead and try it in Word or Powerpoint.

Alban

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 9:06 pm

You could work around it with a change of font size.

H̄

{Size=18}H(/size}{size=24}*{/size}

* Paste combining macron here, and replace curly brackets with square brackets to change font size on this forum. Probably easy in Powerpoint, but I don't use it.

vanisaac · Post by **vanisaac** » Wed Mar 10, 2004 9:16 pm

I have a feeling someone needs to write up a proposal to the Unicode consortium. Alban, if you could email me with information on what anti-particles you signify in this way, and how, I'll devote some time to researching a Unicode proposal. Just click on my email button.

Dick Pape · Post by **Dick Pape** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 5:28 am

Boy you guys really are thinking ahead. I'm still working on which macron to use.

alban1 suggests using U+0304 (Combining Macron) or U+0305 (Combining Overline).

What would be wrong with using 00AF (Macron) by directly? Which gets to the question of how or where are the combining forms used?

Thank you,

Dick

alban1 · Post by **alban1** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 3:47 pm

@Bikkhu: Changing the font size on the combining macron will change the line spacing, which is not desired.

@vanisaac: I think it's a problem with the implementation, not with the available codes. If you are interested, visit http://pdg.lbl.gov/. Almost all particles that are listed in the summary tables have antiparticles (except some mesons). Most of those are denoted by the same letter with a bar over it. Some have capital Latin letters, some capital Greek, some yet others. Most frequently used: K, D, B. Note that according to some convention, particles are always written in italics. The H I need is actually different from these as it denotes the antihydrogen atom (the first antiatom ever created). Atoms are denoted by upright letters.

@Dick: I believe the simple macron you are referring to stands for itself and is not automatically combined with the preceding letter.

Alban

alban1 · Post by **alban1** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 5:46 pm

@Bhikkhu Wed Mar 10, 2004 5:42 pm:

I followed your suggestion with the combined glyph. It seems to work, including the hinting, however I have the following problems/questions:

1) If I map the letter to U+0126 as you suggest, I can enter it into Powerpoint using the Insert Symbol command, but I cannot enter it with the Alt - numeric keypad combination (using 294). How come?

2) Can I map the letter to a Unicode character that is not present in the font such that I don't incapacitate any letters?

Alban

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Fri Mar 12, 2004 9:22 am

1. I don't know about the Power Point problem. One can enter any Unicode character in Wordpad with Alter codepoint or even in this forum Ħ

2. You can assign the characters to the Private Use Area, which is intended for characters not defined by the Unicode standard.

You can find some characters from the Private Use area in the Titus Cyberbit Font.

You can type these characters in Wordpad using Alter + codepoint.