Typophile

FONTLAB help making more complete font

Deus Lux

I want to start expanding some of my fonts to include full diacritics, thorn, eth, Cyrillic, and possibly Greek.

Since I have never done this before, I am unsure how to create a blank Fontlab file which I will use for a template. When I create a new (blank) file in Fontlab, I can't seem to find the option for ALL these options in one file. I can get latin and cyrillic, but no greek, or I can get latin and greek but no cyrillic.

Or maybe I'm just not understanding the Fontlab interface? After I create a new file, I can flip through the options in the drop down menu at the top of the window--MacOS, ISO, Windows.... So maybe all the blank empty slots for the glyphs ARE there? Usually when I open a well made font in fontlab I see all the glyphs of the entire font all in one window, that is I don't have to flip through the various OS/ISO settings to see the greek or diacritics, for example.

How can I get all the glyphs for all these languages all in one "window"? (sorry my terminology is lacking here)

Thanks, all.

Mark Simonson

Those different Font window options are just showing you subsets of possible characters you can add to your font. When you select one of these views, you can build characters in that subset. If you switch the view to a different subset, you can build characters in that subset. Any characters you have already made that are not part of the current subset will be displayed at the bottom of the Font window in the order you created them. (You can change the order in the Index Mode view.)

Deus Lux

Thanks, Mark. Is there anyway to create my own subset perhaps, or view the entire font all as one subset? I would much prefer to do it this way if possible.

I found the Latin + Cyrillic + Greek subset. I didn't notice it before because it was abbreviated. I would say most of greek I don't want to tackle yet, but I do want to do the glyphs: franc lira euro (number sign "no.") trademark, omega, estimated, delta, product, etc, up until longs_t.

It would be great if there were away to delete the majority of the greek from the subset, and create like, my own foundry's subset, somehow as a fontalb subset or a .vfb file that I can use from the start of design a font.

Nick Shinn

Glyph > Glyph Names > Save Encodings

Deus Lux

Thanks, Nick. How do I actually remove the glyphs I don't want?

Nick Shinn

I saved these instructions from an earlier Typophile thread, but not the name of the author, so apologies to him/her for the lack of a credit:

Select all the glyphs and hit copy. Then paste into a text editor, which will dump all the names with slashes in front of them. Then find/replace all of the slashes with line breaks in Indesign, Textwrangler, etc. After that add a header and you’re done.

**

You can always rearrange the glyphs in Index Mode and then Save the Encoding file. Relaunch FontLab and select the new encoding scheme under Names

In Index mode, you can drag the glyphs around and rearrange them. Once you have an ordering you like, choose Glyph > Glyph Names > Save Encoding. (This is only available in Index mode.)

By the way, if you want to start with a particular existing encoding before you start rearranging glyphs, switch to Names mode, select the encoding, then choose Glyph > Sort Glyphs > By Encoding. When you go to Index mode, the glyphs will be arranged in this order.

Captured from web.archive.org on 9 Aug 2014. view this capture