"required" special characters

thierry blancpain14 Nov 2005

hello

im not sure if Design is the right subforum, please move this thread if its in the wrong place.

im finishing a font that i plan to release for free download (but with a good EULA, i asked in another thread about that part). i want to finish it for my portfolio (trying to get into a university), and right now im adding some special charaters. its a UC-only font.

right now i have

?
!
,
.
;
$ £ €
long and short -

im planning to add ( ) , @, +, the french characters (ç, ´, `, ^) and the german ones (ä ö ü).

could someone add the characters i'd need for italian and spanish? it is a free font after all, and i dont wanna work much more on this. so english/german/french/italian/spanish are the languages that i want to have in my font.

is there anything i forgot?

and: in german, there is the Sz (ß), but this is used in lc only. if i have an UC-font - would you add it? i mean its UC-only, so somehow there are reasons to add it, but also some against it..

Typography.Guru14 Nov 2005#

The Eszett (»germandoubles«) is replaced by two »S« in uppercase texts. So you can simply make a glyph of two »S«, but you should not leave it blank.

About the missing special characters:
It's always a good idea to design complete codepages. Take a look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Roman

If you use FontLab, it's very easy: Just select the codepage and fill all grey characters with your designs. So you will have support for all the languages mentioned on the Wiki pages above.

Ralf

Si_Daniels14 Nov 2005#

I agree with Ralf, fill out at least one of the listed code-pages. If you don't want to do this, including the characters listed here http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ProductionGuidelines.mspx#office should ensure your font works in Microsoft Office.

thierry blancpain15 Nov 2005#

thanks alot for your help. i added a nightshift yesterday, right now it looks like this:

surely its not perfect, but it was my first "real" font and im quite proud of it (i have a nice vector-illustration poster in a sovjet propaganda style that i can use with this). and note, there is NO kerning or spacing done. this is all in illu!

thierry blancpain16 Nov 2005#

im not sure if anybody will answer in here, but i'll wait with making a new thread till i see that nobody answers here.

as you see this is an UC-only font. now, my question is: i could make the light weight the lc-chars and the normal weight the uc-chars. i'd like that, but im not sure how others see this issue. any opinions?

Si_Daniels16 Nov 2005#

Don't do it - users will still have to switch fonts to get the light weight numerals and punctuation. Just double map the glyphs u&lc or draw small caps and map these to the lc.

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 27 Apr 2015. original URL