composites

[sevry7]

I'll add your request to the todo list.

I'm not sure I understand the compositing. Is it that Truetype requires EVERY character to be pre-composed. But what FC does is generate the precomposed characters using an xml file, so that the designer doesn't have to copy and paste each single variation themselves? I realize there's the option of moving the 'bearings' all right to simulate an overstrike. But with variable width characters, one could never guarantee the placement of the overstrike character.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

No. Truetype doesn't require any characters to be composed, but there are significant benefits to using composites both in design time and TTF file size. The complete composites feature automates the process. It knows which glyphs to insert to make a composite, e.g. ¨ and a to compose ä, but as you rightly observe it cannot possibly know the precise position for every font. The position will be correct only for one font - the font used when calculating the data - for other fonts it may be a long way off. One should adjust the diacritics first so that they are correctly placed vertically and horizontally for àáâãäå then one will have less work adjusting them for èéêë. òóôõö etc.

You could, if you wished, edit the XML file to search and replace horizontal and vertical offsets to suit the current font that you're editing, but that would probably take longer than moving them all using guidelines.

One idea I had was to search and replace key values and replace them with variables, then save that as a template XML file for future use. However, there could be a lot of different variables, so again I doubt whether this would save any time.

[sevry7]

No. Truetype doesn't require any characters to be composed, but there are significant benefits to using composites both in design time and TTF file size.

Filesize. Does that mean that composites are not actually stored as complete contour duplicates, but in some look-up table instead?

I would think, ideally, you have a font technology that was at least marginally superior to what they had at the dawn of typesetting over 400 years ago. Then they had to compose these tiny, tiny little chips for each possible variation in the Greek, particularly, including over 100 abbreviations and ligatures that had been used to save space in handwritten manuscripts. And they had to manufacture the whole run of these in vast multiples and in various font sizes. All pre-composed letters, as it were. 400 years later you'd think that Microsoft or Adobe would have a table one could use, so that the contour is specified just once, the marks above and below are specified just once, and the table indicates the x/y offset for one or more marks superimposed over the letter. I'm getting the sense that for each variation, the contours for letter and marks all have to be entirely duplicated in each 'cell', just like over 400 years ago.

[sevry7]

No. Truetype doesn't require any characters to be composed, but there are significant benefits to using composites

Being new to fonts (I was sort of forced into creating fonts as part of this project) I guess I'll ask the question another way. What exactly are composites? Are these duplicate contours? where every point is duplicated for each composite 'slug'. Or are these merely entries in a table referring to contours which only exist once in one place in the font file?

[Erwin Denissen]

A composite resides in the same table as other glyphs, but only take a few bytes as it links to another glyph.

[sevry7]

A composite resides in the same table as other glyphs, but only take a few bytes as it links to another glyph.

a) Is there a problem using composites to build further composites? There seems to be no problem with Word, or whatever. I've installed fonts with this. But I see in another thread that Fontlab can't handle that?

b) I guess I never did correctly ask the question over in the macro thread, because I'm new to fonts and this program, and it's really a support question, not a new features request (I think). If you just filled out a couple of Unicode pages in your regular font, for example, with maybe a hundred or more carefully placed composites, can you copy those, as composites, to the bold, italic, and bold italic fonts easily? Or would it be simpler to save the regular as an intermediate, temporary font, three times, and just copy the differences from bold, italic and bold italic in manually? assuming regular now consists mostly of composites.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

When Fontlab opens fonts containing composites of composites it converts them to simple glyphs, as I found out to my cost when a friend ran my fonts through Fontlab to add hinting for me.

In Font Creator, there is no problem with using composites of composites.

If you copy compostes to another font they will become simple glyphs, so your latter method of saving the regular font three times is the right way to retain the composition data. Then you can copy the simple glyph members only and the composites will be composed as before, but with the italic or bold glyphs instead of the regular ones. Then you will need to adjust font settings, font metrics, positions of diacritics, etc.

Alternatively you could just use the insert characters and compose composites features.