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Additional ligatures not assigning correctly - Typetool

dalelacy's picture
Posted by dalelacy in
2 Apr 2012 — 4:32pm

Hi everyone,

I've been working on my first san-serif typeface http://typophile.com/node/89023 - and have included a handful of additional ligatures in typetool: f_i / f_f_i / f_l / f_f_l / f_j / f_f_j / f_b / f_h / f_k / s_t / c_t / t_t

I've named them as above in the glyph properties, and left the unicode blank. When I set some sample text in illustrator in one weight, these glyphs are fine, but then if I change the weight of the same text some of these don't render. If the glyphs are named the same, and neither have an assigned unicode, is there any reason why they would be assigned differently?

Also, if I open the glyph window in illustrator, I can manually put these glyphs in - so they're there, just not properly assigned.

Is there a trick to getting these additional glyphs assigned correctly? I'm not looking for them to auto populate at this stage, i'm just trying to have them render correctly.

I posted this in the critique thread for the font, but thought it might help to add it here.

Thanks,

Dale.

agisaak
4 Apr 2012 — 7:38am
agisaak's picture

I'm a bit unclear on what you've done, but when you say I'm not looking for them to auto populate at this stage does that mean that you don't currently have an opentype liga feature which inserts these glyphs?

If not, and you're using the glyph palette to insert these, some applications (not sure about illustrator) will use the GID (glyph ID) to reference glyphs with no unicode value. If this is the case, you won't be able to change weights and preserve the glyphs unless the different weights contain the exact same glyph complement in the exact same order.

You really want to enter these ligatures as sequences of two (or more) characters and then let the liga or dlig features convert them to ligatures.

André

dalelacy
4 Apr 2012 — 4:13pm
dalelacy's picture

Hey André,

I was under the impression that you can't add opentype liga features in typetool - ultimately this would be ideal, but I think i'd need to upgrade to fontlab. It looks like typetool doesn't let you change/order the glyph ID's either..

At the moment i'm just creating the glyphs as you've said, using the glyphs palette. And i'm guessing the ordering must be wrong.

Short of creating a new font, and copy/pasting in the same order for each weight, i'm not too sure what my options are.

Thanks for your help.

Dale.

agisaak
4 Apr 2012 — 6:08pm
agisaak's picture

I've never used FontTool, so I'm not familiar with its limitations. If it can’t add features and you didn't want to spend the $$$ on upgrading to FontLab, you could always create your font in FontTool and then use AFDKO to add the features (or FontForge).

André

dalelacy
4 Apr 2012 — 6:35pm
dalelacy's picture

Thanks André, I'll look into both of them. Thanks for your help.

Dale.

dalelacy
8 Apr 2012 — 5:40pm
dalelacy's picture

I've been able to get this to work using font forge - I've created my font and all the metrics in typetool, then opened the font in font forge and added the liga features as you suggested.

Thanks again André for your help.

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