I could use some help creating a simple
test font for Windows. I'd like it to have the US latin alphabet and the following characters:
\u5000
\u20050
I don't have any experience creating fonts.
Can someone suggest a good tutorial site
or some 'font creator' software?
Thanks in advance for any help.
--Erik Ostermueller
There are a couple of different ways to encode Supplementary Plane characters in fonts.
The very latest version of FontLab (4.6) has a mechanism to write the appropriate format of cmap table; this mechanism obliges you to name glyphs using their Unicode 32bit scalar value, e.g. u20050. When generating the font, FontLab will read these glyph names and write the appropriate cmap table entries. Note that I have not tried this myself.
Alternatively, you can pass your fonts through Microsoft's free VOLT tool. VOLT is intended for adding OpenType features to a font (and you may need to add at least one feature: I've never tried passing a font through VOLT without adding any features), but it also rewrites the cmap table. In VOLT's Glyph Edit window you can assign and edit Unicode values for individual; note, however, that in VOLT you need to use surrogate pairs for Supplementary Plane characters, not scalar values.
You will probably find this scalar<->surrogate convertor useful.
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