New to Font Creator; some questions
Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:38 pm
Hi everybody, first post.
I'm trying to make a font that will type baseball scoring and am looking to make a spiffy modern TrueType font to replace the bitmap font that I made on the Mac a few years ago using ResEdit and Font Master '88.
I have a few questions, and non-flame answers are much appreciated!
First off, the glyphs in this font will be mainly squares with information in one of the four corners. Many will have no width, and others will have width equal to the height.
In some of the Open Type fonts I see nowadays, rather than make new glyphs for, say, the "1/2" character, or the A-umlaut, the font seems to have instructions to call up the 1, slash, and 2 and resize them and put them in certain positions to make a "1/2". Same for the A-umlaut; it pastes an umlaut over an A. Can creators of new fonts set these instructions up any way they like? I'm going to put all my glyphs in the Unicode Private Use area and would like to not have to copy and paste the same items over and over.
How many zero-width characters can be superimposed at once? On System 7 Macs, I had trouble putting more than two characters on top of one another. When scoring a baseball game, usually you'll indicate how the batter got to each base in turn. So if someone walked, stole second, went to third on a wild pitch, and was brought home by batter #4, the user would paste a "lower right corner 'BB'", then a "upper right corner 'SB'", then a "top left corner 'WP'", and finally (and this is the one that would have the full width) a "lower right corner '4'". Is this possible?
If I am stuck copying and pasting glyphs, and then resizing them myself, can you type in the desired sizes and coordinates? Softy makes you drag them with the mouse, and precision dragging can make your arm hurt after a while!
Thanks and best regards from a fellow font fanatic!
I'm trying to make a font that will type baseball scoring and am looking to make a spiffy modern TrueType font to replace the bitmap font that I made on the Mac a few years ago using ResEdit and Font Master '88.
I have a few questions, and non-flame answers are much appreciated!
First off, the glyphs in this font will be mainly squares with information in one of the four corners. Many will have no width, and others will have width equal to the height.
In some of the Open Type fonts I see nowadays, rather than make new glyphs for, say, the "1/2" character, or the A-umlaut, the font seems to have instructions to call up the 1, slash, and 2 and resize them and put them in certain positions to make a "1/2". Same for the A-umlaut; it pastes an umlaut over an A. Can creators of new fonts set these instructions up any way they like? I'm going to put all my glyphs in the Unicode Private Use area and would like to not have to copy and paste the same items over and over.
How many zero-width characters can be superimposed at once? On System 7 Macs, I had trouble putting more than two characters on top of one another. When scoring a baseball game, usually you'll indicate how the batter got to each base in turn. So if someone walked, stole second, went to third on a wild pitch, and was brought home by batter #4, the user would paste a "lower right corner 'BB'", then a "upper right corner 'SB'", then a "top left corner 'WP'", and finally (and this is the one that would have the full width) a "lower right corner '4'". Is this possible?
If I am stuck copying and pasting glyphs, and then resizing them myself, can you type in the desired sizes and coordinates? Softy makes you drag them with the mouse, and precision dragging can make your arm hurt after a while!
Thanks and best regards from a fellow font fanatic!