Font Forum

Hi All,

I would like to add some characters (with their ligature shapes etc.) to an already existing font. The font already has similar shapes and I would like to know if their is a way to copy and paste existing characters (with their ligatures etc.) and then adjust them (the glyphs) accordingly.

Thanks

Select the glyphs in the Font Overview and copy them.

Open a new empty glyph and paste the glyphs as composite glyph members in the Glyph Edit Window.

Move them around, then decompose the composite to edit the contours further, join them, etc.

Hi,

I've been away for a while but I have recently tried once more. These are the steps I took:

1. I inserted the character $08B6
2. I then copied and pasted the letters “beh-arab” and “meem-arab” to create the appropriate glyph.
3. I then used the insert tab to insert a new glyph for its initial form because this character does not have a presentation form code point in the Unicode library.
4. Similar to before I created a glyph for it’s initial form.
5. I also changed the left side and right side bearing for both the new isolated and initial forms in order to avoid overlapping. I made sure that these numbers matched their respective characters.
6. Then I went to the open type designer. Under ‘single substitution2’ I added the new glyphs.
7. But when I test the font, the character does not join whatsoever.

I created a word document with images so that you could better visualise what I did. You can find that document along with my fontcreator document in the link below:

Just click here:

Thanks in advance.

I don't use Word, and though I might be able to open the file in LibreOffice, since your free download is only once every two hours, I skipped it.

Why not attach the images to the forum? Crop them first to show just what is relevant to you topic to save space.

I took the liberty to attach the file to the post.

Thanks Erwin. Again I'd really appreciate it if someone can please shed some light on this issue for me. I've been stuck on this for a couple of months now.

As shown in the screen shot, you have mixed the glyphs, as the input glyph should be behsmallmeemabove-arab, and the output glyph must be behsmallmeemaboveabove-arab.init.

Yes thanks for pointing that out. However when I switched them around, it still doesnt seem to work. The same goes for the medial and final forms. Please help

I can now confirm the issue. I've also tested with Scheherazade, and that one seems to fail as well. So for some reason the text shaping engine isn't working as we expect it to work.

You might have to contact someone who has more experience with Arabic fonts and complex text shaping engines. You could try to contact Behdad Esfahbod, as he maintains a text shaping library called HarfBuzz.

If he is willing the look into it, let us know the results!

I will try to contact him. The strange thing is that when I edit an existing glyph it works perfectly fine however its only when I try to add a new glyph/character that it doesn't work which is why I figured I must be missing a crucial step. But thanks for responding.