Hi,

I've come into a problem whilst trying to compile a font which contains some Japanese characters.
I have a basic Latin character set (MacOS Roman encoding), but with some additional unicode characters such as uni6782, uni571F – these total around 20 different characters.

The font compiles fine from Fontlab, and the characters are accessible in (All on Mac OSX 10.8) TextEdit, Adobe InDesign CS3->CS6, as well as OpenOffice. However, when I try and type these characters (via a japanese keyboard layout) or paste them in, the font reverts to a default system font which contains the characters.

Is there a certain Japanese name I need to apply for Microsoft Office (Word 14.2.0) Mac?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Terry

Technically it is possible to add both a ligature in the common form of "f_f_i" (and its accompanying Feature code) and a separate Unicode glyph for the same character -- U+FB03 for "ffi" -- to the same font.
Is this a good idea? I'm pretty sure it's not!

I only tested this with InDesign, but I vaguely recalled that it would automatically use "fi" and "fl" ligatures, if a font had these characters in the correct Unicode positions. However, a quick test with a freshly created OTF font shows it does not (in CS4, at least). Perhaps this is (or was) only true for Plain Old Type 1 fonts without any further OTF enhancements.

I put the pre-alpha (but very usable for low enough resolutions) version of monospaced scalable variant of Unifont font to http://ilyaz.org/software/fonts.

My client has a corporate font (Unit Pro). The company produces many multilingual documents in languages using Latin script as well as in Chinese. Is there a way to tell Windows something like: if Unit Pro is selected and some characters are missing, use "Custom Chinese Font" instead? In other words, is there a way how to define custom fallback font for Chinese glyphs under Windows? Any help appreciated.

We would like to learn how to incorporate a unicode character that exists in one (or more) font sets, but not in the font that we wish to use. Unicode 0268 is a small letter i with a stroke in, for example, New Tomes Roman, but we want to have it in Caslon. Any suggestions

Hi! I'm designing a layered typeface with three weights and some extra glyphs (ligatures, swashes and some weird alternates). I made open type feature for ligatures and kerns but I let some extra glyphs without feature. When I use those glyphs and I change the weight, the glyph doesn't change. For example, if I write "BARCELONA" with one of my extra B's, and I change the weight, it change all the word except the B.
I've been looking the generated file and it seems that those extra glyphs without feature doesn't have UICODE names, so when we change the weight, they doesn't change. I've tryied to use the option GLYPHS>GLYPHS NAME>GENERATE UNICODE but it doesn't work.
Anyone knows what can I do to generate the same UNICODE names on the three weights.

Is there a way to keep unicode when I append a glyph? I drew a roman font and all unicode and naming work well. Now I want to draw the italic one. So, I start from an italic vbf file I've already drew as a basic file and I want to import the new glyph I've inserted in the roman one. When I import it I lost the unicode name. Is some typophile user has a solution to append a glyph without lost the unicode number? I hope the problem description is clear enough.
Thanks.

Subject : WANTED - unicode sans font with differentiated Il1| & O0

I've been trying to find a simple sans serif font for a specialist mathematical programming language that uses special symbols (available in unicode fonts). Some unicode fonts have inconsistent symbols sizes eg Tahoma and Verdana, DejaVu sans has advanced logic symbols (the round ones) that are consistent in size but larger than all the other symbols.

These fonts render some or all of vertical bar, capital I small L and digit 1 identically. This is unacceptable in a programming language where a single wrong character can cause a bug that is very difficult to trace (the program will look right). Capital O and zero also need to be obviously different.

Hello all,

I am quite new to the process of creating a font so please bear with the supreme beginner-like questions about to be asked. I have 2 core issues, one of which pertains to display resolution and rendering (and the specs needed to build the font to the appropriate scale):

Glyph definition in relation to unicode standards
Pixel perfect glyphs for certain pixel scales

Given the table below, one can see that the only noticeable difference in the glyphs, is the one between the character U+FBE5 and the characters U+FBE4 and U+0620. For the other characters the glyphs from the Arial font are identical. One other thing that called my attention was the fact that indeed the Arial font considers the character pairs (FBE4, 06D0), (FBE2, 06C9) and (FBD7, 06C7) equivalent, as they have the same GlyphID's.

Need help to write a simple Python script. Leave your e-mail and I will contact you off list.

I'm trying to get a handle on new characters that have emerged in recent years, which are important enough to show up in standard Latin fonts (western + CE accented). Also secondarily curious about anything relevant to Greek and Cyrillic.

The ones I know about are currency symbols, such as the new symbols for the Turkish lira (U+20BA, http://typophile.com/node/90604), and the Indian rupee (U+20B9). Older ones include the Ukrainian hryvna (U+20B4) and Ghanaian cedi. Are there others I should be concerned with?

Hello people of typophile!

First of all, english is not my native language, so i hope not to make too much mistakes in my communication! I've been a reader of the forum for years, and by now I thought that my first post would have been for the release of a typeface, but nope.. not yet...

WOBURN, Mass.--Dec 14, 2011 -- Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: TYPE), a leading global provider of text imaging solutions, has introduced the Arial® Unicode® MS Bold typeface. Comprised of nearly 50,000 characters, the newest addition to the Arial suite marks a typographical first — the ability to use a true, bold version of Arial Unicode.

Arial Unicode MS Bold complements Arial Unicode MS, the regular weight of the same design, which is included in Microsoft® Office® products and is shipped in various applications.

What is the best way to find informations about use and functions of a specific unicode character?
For instance I would like to know, why Ƀ (U+0243) exists, when it was created...
Thank you for your help.

Hello dear typophiles,

I'm working on typesetting a document with mixed latin and greek text. My problem is not being able to find out what font was used for the greek, or even a suitable replacement.

The "manuscript" that I received is an XML file, so I have no information on what font was used for the typesetting of the previous edition, and I'm having a hard time finding out what font was used.

Copy from http://twitter.com/openvclosed showing weasel word racists
(mostly from British Linux operating system user groups (LUGs)) trying
to suppress the alteration of the 11th letter shape from k/K to
unicode 0915 shape meant for spiritual reasons.

Nix 31 Oct 2010 Gllug says "We're _too short of decent free font
designers. Please stop trying to drive them off"

Tig 1 Nov 2010 Staffslug says "Don't forget the chic?en ?orma"

Andrew Edwards 1 Nov Staffslug says "_sacred meat"

martin rome 1 Nov Staffslug says "_people_"think"_i seriously hope
this is a joke_
KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK :P"

Peter Cannon 1 Nov 2010 Staffslug says "_2 X Onion bhaji 1 X
Chicken Phal_ please_"

Hello everyone.

I'm making a PHP application to generate text labels. The PHP libraries seem to don't support OpenType features.
Now I have no problem working with unicode index to display the standard characters.
But, as far as I know, the OpenType features are name based.
For example: if I want to display a ligature «my» I have to replace «m» and «y» unicodes indexes by «my» unicode index.
The problem now is I don't have unicode indexes on this characters and I can't reffer to them by their names.

The questions are:

Is there any existing unicode for these glyphs and I am missing them?
Do I need to reencode all the glyphs?
Which is the best way to reencode a font and/or generate unicode names for this purposes?
Is there any standard?

I'm looking for a font that will be able to translate some text my sensei sent me. I'm trying to design a card for him but for the life of me can not find a decent Japanese font for it (with Kanji, found a few kana ones). I think I might need unicode ?

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/samples/AoyagiKouzanFont2OTF__Japanese.gif
looks awesome. but doesn't seem to work on my computer. I've installed for 20 and none seem to translate well, which makes me think I need unicode version?

found it here http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Japanese.html

I need to use this text:
山下武道こくさいきょかい

and help/direction would be amazing.

Ignore this post if you’re reading it on a Mac.

Either I was installing it wrong previously, or Microsoft fixed it in 1.4, and I was using 1.3, but finally I got Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator to install and run in Windows 7, and I used it to build a custom German/English “typographer’s keyboard” layout. (My physical keyboard has a standard German layout.) This enabled me to add a bunch of extra punctuation and some archaic stuff such as ſ.

I also managed to add two dingbats from the Unicode Zapf Dingbats subset range, U+2766 and U+2767.

❦ ❧

If you can see those, you are seeing them in pure Unicode. Windows is switching fonts somewhere to display them.

Hello,

Our users are experiencing a very discouraging issue in regards to how MS Word (in Windows) handles non-unicode characters. This issue is confirmed in both Word 2007 and the Word 2010 Beta using Windows XP SP3; I suspect it works the same way in 2003.

Issue:
1) A user creates a document using a non-unicode font, entering characters to represent scientific notations. For example, he enters a Mu (µ). Note: I pasted in a unicode-compliant Mu for reference.
2) The user opens his document and attempts to copy / paste this non-unicode character representing a Mu into a web browser for entry into our system. It pastes as an unrecognized character. This is expected.

Here is a Python script that dumps to the output a utf-8 input file. The script works fine on Linux but if the input contains characters above U+FFFF it does not behave as expected on the Mac with whatever version of Python I use (I tried with Python 2.5, and 2.6 on OS X 10.5, and with Python 2.5, 2.6 and 3.1 on OS X 10.6).

Hi all,

I tried asking this question over at the FontLab forum, but there doesn’t seem to be very much activity there, so I’m trying here as well. Apologies in advance if this question has been asked before – at any rate I have not been able to find an answer in the archives.

I am developing a font which includes a large number of glyphs in the Private Use Area. For these I would like to use my own names, primarily because many of them have alternate forms accessible through aalt, stylistic sets etc. Coding would get much easier if I could use semantic names rather than “uniExxx”, especially in case I want to change the Unicode index of a glyph (each time I do that, I have to track down every reference to that glyph in the code and change the name).

I was analyzing Unicode tables and some pro fonts to understand how it works. Even after navigate through the huge Unicode documentation, some doubts remains:

1. Unicode tables does not includes variations for small caps, petite caps, swashes, beginnings, endings and alternates. So, all these glyphs will have no Unicode set while the font development. Correct?

2. When the font is generated, these glyphs without Unicode are recorded on Private User Area and receive a Unicode assigned by the font generator program. Correct?

3. Glyphs without a Unicode definition works correctly but are identified as NULL in InDesign glyph palette. Is there a way to replace this NULL name by a descriptive one?

Google now has the reading abilities of a teenager and can read f-ligatures: “[T]he characters fi can... be represented as two characters (f and i) or a special display form fi. A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent – to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the Web, especially generated PDF documents.