> When I used the Generate Glyph function,
> everything worked fine/as usual except
> that the accented lowercase i composite
> characters used the regular i instead
> of the dotless i.

Please describe what exactly you did, step-by-step.

Our web hosting company is having problems so our website is currently down.

A.

Nick,
thing is... When you make an "iacute", what you get is "i" + "acute". The "i" has its dot up there to begin with. Try this:
Create the dotlessi glyph.
Glyph / Generate Glyphs...
Then in the field ask for dotlessi+acute.
Voila!

There is a file on you hard disk which is used to build glyphs. It is called "alias.dat", and you can use it to define your glyph-generation rules. So, you can start with your Eth by having the following "recipe" in your alias.dat: Eth D+hyphen

That will copy the outlines from the D and the hyphen, which you can then decompose and tweak to get what you want.

Hope that was helpful, c

Please describe what exactly you did, step-by-step

Thanks, Adam. After adjusting metrics, etc., I selected Generate Glyphs, then chose the file I had been using (successfully at all times) with FontLab 4.6. The contents of the file are...

Agrave,Aacute,Acircumflex,Atilde,Adieresis,Aring,Ccedilla,Egrave, Eacute,Ecircumflex,Edieresis,Igrave,Iacute,Icircumflex,Idieresis, Ntilde,Ograve,Oacute,Ocircumflex,Otilde,Odieresis,Scaron,Ugrave, Uacute,Ucircumflex,Udieresis,Yacute,Ydieresis,Zcaron,agrave,aacute, acircumflex,atilde,adieresis,aring,ccedilla,egrave,eacute, ecircumflex,edieresis,igrave,iacute,icircumflex,idieresis, ntilde,ograve,oacute,ocircumflex,otilde,odieresis, scaron,ugrave,uacute,ucircumflex,udieresis,yacute,ydieresis,
zcaron (spaces have been added to keep the above string from flying off the page).

As I said, there was a character named dotlessi and it was mapped to Unicode #0131, as it had been in the past, but the generated glyphs used the regular lowercase i -- not a problem to decompose the character and delete the dot, but a minor annoyance and a sort of puzzlement. Re: Chester's comments -- there IS an alias.dat file in my old FontLab 4.6 folder under Mapping, but there is no such folder nor file in the FL5 folder. Do I need to copy and paste some files?

Nick,
there is only one alias.dat file, so that's the one to monkey with. (Tip: copy the original alias.dat, and rename it somehing like "aliasdatsafe".) I've got a couple of generations of FontLab running at the moment, hence any confusion about location. and at a certain point the app started to use a folder in the User/Library/Application Support directory.

If your dotlessi doesn;t have its Unicode index, that shouldn't matter for this exercise. You need to make sure to request this:
...e+dieresis dotlessi+grave dotlessi+acute dotlessi+circumflex dotlessi+dieresis,n+tilde...

If you ask for the "i", that's what FL is going to use; it's not smart enough to use the fotlessi. (I also create a dotlessj glyph which is referenced when making the jcaron and jcircumflex glyphs.)

Best, c

i think there are some screwy combos in the alias.dat file, i think this is one of the more frequent ones that users will encounter. it's easy enough to change the alias file, as outlined above, but some combos should definately be fixed. i guess the best thing to do would be to contact FontLab directly concerning screwy automatic composites.

Thanks for all the input. I checked the OPTIONS tab (which I probably should have done in the first place) and found that the common files for all FontLab applications on my computer were in a non-existent folder under Documents and Settings. I just changed the path to the existing FL4 folder, and things work fine.