playing card font

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honest.bern
Posts: 42
Joined: Mon May 05, 2008 8:28 am
Location: England
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playing card font

Post by honest.bern »

I am using FontCreator 11.5 Professional.

In the past we made symbol fonts with code points up to (decimal) 255. Nowadays we are encouraged to make Unicode fonts and put the symbols in the code points assigned by Unicode. (I have no problem with this.)

I would like to make a font for playing cards. The font will include the usual four compulsory glyphs and playing cards only. The glyphs will not be letters, so they do not need to match the style of any other font: any font can be used for the accompanying text.

I would like to duplicate the glyphs so they can be accessed directly from the keyboard as well. Can I do this by making e.g. the letters a-z composite glyphs? Will this keep the file size small? Will it mean that as soon as I modify the original glyph, the copy is updated identically as well?

Any advice or warnings welcome.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: playing card font

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Yes, creating A-Z and a-z as composites of the Unicode Play Card glyphs, or vice versa, will keep file size small and save time when editing.

See my tip of the day for Creating Composites with Copy/Paste

You could also use a Character variant OpenType feature to substitute A-z for playing cards. Then you could type regular text with the font, and enable the character variant to type playing cards.

The playing cards will also have a lot of repeating elements, so composing them from multiple components — Background, Suit Symbol, and numbers — will also be more efficient. Design one spade symbol and use it many times.
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