Importing lots of characters

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Mike Thompson
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Importing lots of characters

Post by Mike Thompson »

I have decided to import a latin character set from another font into my Hebrew font.
I may have to do this for Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic.
This could be a massive amount of work. Ideally there would be a
"Merge Fonts' function. However all I know is "copy" followed by
"Paste Special". I don't relish this labor so is there a simpler way
using FCP or some other software?
Mike Thompson
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Post by Heian-794 »

I was thinking about this exact problem yesterday.

I'm making a font which uses the private area of Unicode, but I decided to add basic Latin characters for completeness. Using Paste Special and selecting "preserve mappings", it's easy to paste many characters in at once, but only if you want to keep the characters in the same positions. What if you want to paste a large number of characters in, but assign them to, say, "N + X to N + X + 20" (where x is some arbitrary number) instead of "N to N+20". An example would be pasting in the entire alphabet, but starting at EA41 instead of 0041. Can this be done?

Also, when adding blank glyphs to an in-progress font, how is the default width determined? In my font, Font Creator makes all those characters 905 units wide, and it would be really convenient to have all of them changed to 2048 units in one stroke rather than have to go manually adjusting every single one of them.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Mike. I fail to see how this is “A massive amount of work.” Perhaps if you had to draw all the glyphs by hand it would be, but just copying and pasting the glyphs is a matter of seconds for each typeface. I saw your earlier post on this, but declined to respond, thinking it would take me longer to explain than for you to just get on and do it.

In your Latin font, select the glyphs you wish to insert (the 94 glyphs from ! to ~ would be a bare minimum), and copy (control C)

Switch to the Hebrew equivalent (regular, italic, etc.)

From the insert menu, select Insert Character. In the Basic Latin character set, double-click on !, then hold down shift and double-click on ~ then click on Add.

Then paste your Latin glyphs into the new characters (Control V). That should be all you need to do. All mappings, postscript names, and metrics should be present and correct.

Finally, go to Settings, Ranges, and recalculate Unicode Ranges, Character Maps, font metrics, etc.

Multiplied by four, this might amount to perhaps twelve minutes or forty minutes at most. I would recommend adding a few more glyphs to each typeface to cover the entire ANSI character set. This might take a bit longer as the glyphs are not always in order.
Last edited by Bhikkhu Pesala on Sun Mar 20, 2005 10:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

@Heian-794,

To paste the glyphs into the private use area is no different. Just insert the character range you wish to use as describe above, and paste the glyph data into those new glyphs. By default, the mappings are not copied, just the glyph outlines and metrics.

When inserting new glyphs, the width is derived from the average width for the font on the Settings, Ranges tab. You can alter this to 2048 before inserting the new glyphs, to have them all added at 2048. Then you can use the calculate button to restore the new average for the font.
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Heian-794
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Post by Heian-794 »

To paste the glyphs into the private use area is no different. Just insert the character range you wish to use as describe above, and paste the glyph data into those new glyphs. By default, the mappings are not copied, just the glyph outlines and metrics.


But Bhikku, how would you then get the correct mappings? Would you have to go to each character one by one and type it in? I've been doind that, and it's a lot of work.

Edit: Now I see what to do. First put the character range into the font with Insert -> Characters, and then paste my hitherto-unassigned glyphs right into that range?
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