Help adding a character onto an existing Arabic font

[ibanaham]

Hi,

I am trying to add a character onto an already existing Arabic font. I have been trying for some time but I just cannot seem to get the open type feature to work. I have attached a link to a PDF where you can see the steps that I followed.

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Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

[Erwin Denissen]

I don’t know why, but it seems to fail with other fonts as well.

[ibanaham]

It works when I modify a glyph but not when I add one which is strange. Do you know anyone else who may be able to help with this?

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

If adding a glyph you may well need to add it to a class being used by an OpenType feature that does the repositioning.

[ibanaham]

If adding a glyph you may well need to add it to a class being used by an OpenType feature that does the repositioning.

Could you please explain or direct me to a page were I could learn how to do this? I would like to add that I when I click on the 'shaper icon' under 'open type designer', the letter joins perfectly but when I test the font as an OTF it fails to do so. I have taken some screenshots so that you could see what I mean.

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Is their a way to install the font as seen using the 'shaper' icon?

Thanks in advance,

p.s. I am a newbie to this

[Erwin Denissen]

Maybe the people mentioned in this document can further help:
https://www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n4498.pdf

[ibanaham]

Thanks. I've been in contact with some of them but they are not sure either. I have however been playing around some more with Fontcreator. I believe I have discovered what the issue is. I'd like to share what I have discovered here, perhaps you can help shed some more light on this.

For a visual look on the steps that I took you can click the link below.

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I added the character U06B7 and U08B6. U06B7 is in the Arabic chart and U08B6 is in the Arabic extended chart. I added it’s (U06B7) initial, medial and final forms as I did with U08B6. Behold! U06B7 joins perfectly unlike U08B6. This would mean that Arabic characters in the Arabic chart work well but the Arabic characters in the Arabic extended charts are not recognised. The issue seems to be that the Arabic script does not include the letters in the Unicode Arabic extended charts.

Is there a workaround for this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Erwin Denissen]

I've posted this issue on Twitter and some friendly type gurus have been very helpful. For now it seems a bug in Microsoft shaping engines. So to be continued.

[ibanaham]

Thanks. I've just seen the post. Although the problem may be beyond Microsoft as there seems to be the same issue with Adobe and Android.