FontLab problem with naming glyphs
Hi all,
I have serious trouble in understanding this thing about the naming of the glyphs (and all the other in my eyes too complicated stuff about all the naming in a font.-).
In certain situations- please don’t ask me how it came up - I found myself a glyph board like the one below. It has large designs so the letters are not visible in the whole. Tried thousand numbers in thousand menus to make it fit without success. ;-)
But this is not the problem here. What makes me sick is in this case my ‘R’ It has the strange name _0082 or something like that and if I want to change its name FontLab cancels it from its place and throws me at the end (and its not possible to paste it away from there!) where I absolutely don’t want to have it and where besides it doesn’t work any longer with the R-key for example in the metrics window. How can I achieve that it stays where it is meant to be in between Q and S and is named R and comes out pressing the R-key? Would be a miracle! Why couldn’t the FontLab programmers not do a simple thing as it was for decades in FontStudio? I wonder about the sense of all the complications.
Thanks
Stefan
30.Sep.2007 2.24am
It puts the R at the end because it doesn’t recognize it as an R.
As I have told you in a recent post, you should’t create standard characters from scratch. They are all already prepared with the right names and unicodes.
I would strongly suggest to start over.
File->New
You empty font should look like this:
You can then copy and paste your glyph R from the old font to the slot named R in the new font and it should work as expected.
30.Sep.2007 3.02am
Hi Ralph,
>As I have told you in a recent post, you should’t create standard characters from scratch
You did? ;-)
No, seriously, thanks!
>You can then copy and paste your glyph R from the old font to the slot named R in the new font and it should work as expected.
It’s exactly what I did. Works fine.
Thanks again
Stefan
PS I like your patient smile on the photo.
It seems to be made for people like me :-)
30.Sep.2007 6.05am
Which glyphs appear in the font window and where in the sequence they are located is determined in the encoding file. The encoding file is a simple text document that lives in the following directory:
MyHD / Users / UserDirectory / Library / Application Support / FontLab / EncodingTo build your own custom encoding try this: Duplicate one of the existing files, change the file name and the unique number in the first line of the document and insert your own fonts name like this:
%%FONTLAB ENCODING: 11005; MyFabFontYou will see that it is very easy to change the order of the glyphs or to add a glyph in the desired spot in the sequence like this:
F
G
G.alt
H
In case of doubt the FLS manual is a super resource (p.152).
Good luck.
30.Sep.2007 10.54am
Hi Hannes,
thanks, sounds very interesting! Seems you know something about it.
I will try this. For now I helped myself as adviced above by creating a new standard font and copying the glyphs into it. Yet, as a solution it felt strange. Yours seems to be worth a try.
Stefan
30.Sep.2007 11.40am
Stefan,
If you open any of the standard encoding pages in FontLab—for instance Latin Extended A—you will have a prebuilt encoding in proper naming. You simply draw your glyphs in the boxes with the names that coincide. Be sure you have the naming set to name instead of unicode so the names show up.
ChrisL