Typophile

Font studio 5 - Make a new character

oollff

Hi,
I was wondering if it is possible to create one new character in Font studio and save it the same way a newly created character would be saved in Private Character Editor. I mean, i dont want the newly created character assigned to any current letter, so the only way to use it would be to copy and paste it.

More detailed info on what i want to do:
I want to create a few characters that each represents a word, like my own Chinese language based on English. But the problem when i try to do this in Font Studio is that i have to assign the it to a current character. So if i create a Chinese character for A and one for B etc. Than when i create that font and install it and use it, whenever i type A that Chinese character i design appear, but if i copy that Chinese character i designed and past it into notepad for example, than the letter A is displayed. But i want it still to display the Chinese Character.

If i on the other hand create a character in Private Character Editor and copy it, it will stay constant always. I want to do the same thing in Font Studio because the characters created in Font Studio look so much better.

Thanks in advance if anyone could help me with this.

Than when i create that font and install it and use it, whenever i type A that Chinese character i design appear, but if i copy that Chinese character i designed and past it into notepad for example, than the letter A is displayed. But i want it still to display the Chinese Character.

In theory this would be possible as long as your font is installed at the system level on the relevant computer and is set to be the default font (where that is possible) in the applications you are using. As soon as you change to a different font the correct character for that code point will be displayed, so the behaviour you are hoping to see is dependent on how you set up the computer(s) on which the font is installed.

In general this is very bad practice for designing fonts and as soon as you introduce the font to different environments over which you have little or no control you will start to see unexpected and unpredictable results. If the character you are creating adheres to a Unicode code point then it should be assigned to that code point in order to display consistently, regardless of which application you are using. If you are creating Chinese characters then you will find fewer fonts (depending on the computer) that support it but it will be universally (and correctly) recognised.

As far as I can tell, Private Character Editor maps its characters to code points in the Private Use Area. You could set up Fontlab Studio look and behave a bit more like PCE by toggling "Unicode ranges" mode in the Font window, then choosing "E000 Private Use Area" from the dropdown. (You can also assign Unicode values manually in the Glyph Properties box.) I don't know enough about PCE and its TTE files, Font Links, etc. to know if generating an ordinary font with PUA-encoded glyphs would yield the result you're after, but at least your custom characters would not be sharing Unicode values with existing characters.

Thanks very much for the replays. I will look in to toggling the "Unicode ranges".

I my idea is not really to create Chinese characters or that the characters i am creating should be easily used by another system. I am trying to create one character that represents a whole word and than use AutoHotkey to display the character when i type that word. For ex. i type Performance and it automatically change the set of letters in Performance to '', i know u cannot see this symbol bc i created it in PCE on my computer. But the dynamics of the symbol is the same, and as you can see, using this symbol instead of Performance saves a lot of space.

The problem with PCE is that i cannot back up the characters i make. But if i create the characters in FS and create a font from them than i could easily back up the project. The inconvenience is that i am creating a character on a place a normal letter is. So if i copy the newly created symbol to the AutoHotkey script, it will not show the symbol i created but the letter in its place. So. when writing in Word i would have to change the font to the one i created, only on that specific letter i want to be shown as a symbol. And doing this will make the easiness of it all pointless.

By the way, If anyone knows how to back up the characters created in PCE, please share this with me.

Thanks again.

It's been a while since I've had to deal with characters made with the Private Character Editor, but it was painful. This software used to be known as EUDCEDIT, where eudc stands for "end user defined characters," so you might try googling by that name. Michael Kaplan has a 2010 blog post that lists the two files EUDCEDIT creates when used under WinXP, eudc.tte and eudc.euf, and mentions the difficulty of restoring the latter. My recollection is that the practical way to "liberate" the bitmaps was by screen-grabs.

Personally, I'd be really wary of relying on a word-processor's customized input routine tied to a custom version of a standard font that retains the orignal's name. And while creating one's own Chinese input system might be fun, for serious use I'd rather learn one that has evolved through decades of use. I like 倉頡 (cangjie), though I gather 五笔 (wubi) is similar. Having spent the time to learn cangjie, I can toggle that IME on with a key combination, press a few keys to get my character, and then toggle back to continue typing with regular keyboard input. MS Word will automatically find a font for my character, even if it is a rare form up in Unicode's CJK Extension B (note that accessing Extension B requires adjusting the IME's default settings). And if I want to share my thoughts with others I don't have to print them out: anyone else can read my file with their system's standard software.

Good luck!
David

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