why are some glyphs missing from ttf?

[NinnaD]

I have a number of unmapped glyphs. I specifically select Include in Exports > All Exports (but the same result with just Desktop chosen). When I open the exported ttf, glyphs are missing. Why? What do I need to do to have them in the exported font?

[Erwin Denissen]

Those are probably unused glyphs. Such glyphs can not be accessed in a normal way, so they can be safely excluded.

If you still want those glyphs in your exported fonts, then uncheck the option in the Options dialog on the Font tab.

ExcludeUnused.png (39.49 KiB) Viewed 2660 times

[NinnaD]

If you still want those glyphs in your exported fonts, then uncheck the option in the Options dialog on the Font tab.

OK, this worked, thanks!

Those are probably unused glyphs.

What, specifically, makes a glyph unused? Searching for a solution, I created a class of these glyphs in OT and included them in MarktoBase feature, but that didn't make them 'used'.

[Erwin Denissen]

There are applications that allow you to access glyphs directly, so they can use such glyphs, but in general unused glyphs can not be accessed.

E.g. such glyph has no Unicode mapping and there is no OpenType layout feature that gets to it.

[PJMiller]

If they are included in an open type feature then they should be 'used'. Another way of making them 'used' is to assign them code points in the PUA (private use area).

[NinnaD]

such glyph has no Unicode mapping and there is no OpenType layout feature that gets to it.

That was my presumption as well, but maybe it depends on the kind of layout feature? M2B didn't do the trick - that's all I'm saying - and having the solution you mentioned, I'm somehow disinclined at the moment to test other features.

Another way of making them 'used' is to assign them code points in the PUA

My PUA is a bit crowded , but I was going to appropriate some other large unused range - if nothing else worked.

There are applications that allow you to access glyphs directly, so they can use such glyphs

And thank goodness for that! Latin-script fonts are simple compared to e.g. Mongolian.

Thanks for your help!

[PJMiller]

The Private Use Areas are big, there is no need to appropriate anything from another language (that may cause confusion to programs which try to assess the language support by glyph coverage).

Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (U+E000–U+F8FF), and one each in, and nearly covering, planes 15 and 16 (U+F0000–U+FFFFD, U+100000–U+10FFFD). So that's one of 6,400 characters and two of 65,534 characters each. How many characters do you need ?

[NinnaD]

How many characters do you need ?

If I were to do what I need all at once, which I don't, a bit over 200.000 But these won't be part of the main font project, I just need to create certain glyph combinations, extract values and make calculations, delete, repeat. I prefer baby steps of no more than 10.000 per batch, so without Erwin's tip I'd use part of plane 15.