Hi all,

If it might help, I've put some screen shots of the font Info panels from Fontlab on a friends server. Maybe someone can see something I'm doing wrong.

Light
Light Italic
Regular
Italic
Medium
Medium Italic
Bold
Bold Italic

Again any help would be much appericated.

s.

Your problems seem to have other sources than font naming:

My font list shows all the fonts under one heading apart from the Light It and Regular which are in another font heading.

It seems your font caches are corrupted. Close Adobe apps, search for 'AdobeFnt', then delete files looking like 'AdobeFnt06.lst' (with InDesign 2).
But more important, you should download and run FontFinagler which deletes OSX's font caches.

If I load the fonts using Extensis Suitcase the font always appear at the bottom of the font list.

In FontInfo, 'Encoding and Unicode', did you add Greek?

The naming looks ok (hope I didn't miss something); seems you followed the suggestion to follow Adobe's example.
You should take care that in 'Basic set of font names', after the Weight name,
there is a number in the smaller field. This helps applications sort weights.
Then, you can omit filling out the 'Non-English or special font names' (except if you want to make additional changes) if you activate the option/preference 'do not export OpenType name records' in 'Generating OpenType PS, OpenType TT and TrueType'.

Here (click the logo to enter) is a download PDF 'Font Naming' with some info. See esp the small print and notes on page 3. However, this is still 'beta' ... Adam Twardoch's suggestions are still the most authoritative ones -- if there is any such thing in the OpenType world.

Karsten

To Typophile: Someone eat my image!  :(

k.l.

Thanks for the reply, I'll look into your suggestions now.

s.

k.l.

I tried all your suggestions. but still no luck. I've still got two font entries in the font list,

1.
Light
Light Italic
Regular

2.
Italic
Medium
Medium Italic
Bold
Bold Italic

s.

Hello!

In case you use the 'Additional OpenType names / Non-English or special font names', you might also check if the entry for 16-1-0-0 and 16-3-1-1033 are identical throughout all fonts, like, do regular, light, lightitalic have an additional space after the name? You need to scroll down a bit; I cannot see the entry in your screenshots. For you are speaking of InDesign -- it's OT Family Name / NameID16 which identifies the family to which a font belongs.
Have you really run FontFinagler? I had the problem of a family split into two myself some time ago, and it turned out that it was the cache. Not Adobe's, but OSX's own cache.
As a test, you could also install the fonts on a Mac on which you haven't installed them before.

The only thing I see is the Regular shows 'Test' also in OT Style Name, but I think this is rather a copy/paste error, and irrelevant to the problems.

Karsten

Yes I treid all suggestions and Font Finagler. As a last attempt I going to install on a different machine and if it does'nt work call it a day.

s.

Download TTX and use the command
ttx -t name <MyFont>
to understand what's going on behind the scenes in regards to the 'name' table.

Then compare your results with the .ttx files included in this zip:
http://www.adhesiontext.com/typophile/MinionPro_name.zip

It contains the 'name' table of Minion Regular, Italic, Bold, BoldItalic, Medium and MediumItalic. From these, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with files for Light and LightItalic.

Also, read FontLab's manual: Font Names, p. 214 onwards.

So don't give up yet. Good luck :)

Thanks for the reply Miguel - I actual just got it working, I not too sure how yet, but I'll look into your suggestions as well.

I still have the problem of the font name appering at the bottom of the font list instead of alphabetically.

As k.l. suggested

In FontInfo, ‘Encoding and Unicode’, did you add Greek?

but still the problem occurs

Hi all,

Does anyone have any further ideas on this problem of the fonts appearing at the bottom of the font list.
I have added Greek to the "Encoding and Unicode" page on the Font Info panel, but I'm still getting the same problem.
I have noticed that on the Supported codepage and default character set page, when Iclick the green emerald I don't get anything in the Supported codepages:
Could this have something to do with my problem ?

s.

Simon,

Does your typeface include a full set of Greek glyphs? I can't tell from your screenshots. If not, then you do NOT want the Greek encoding; it can cause the fonts to appear in the lower "international" font list.

I'm not completely certain about this, but I didn't ever see you mention Greek support, and Karsten might have asked about it, thinking it would cause the problem, not solve it.

No I don't have a full set of Greek glyphs.

I thought it was a work around to stop this problem of the font name appearing lower in the font list.

s.

O.K., so I taken out the Greek encoding, and I still have the font name apperaing towards the bottom of the list ?

s.

>I have noticed that on the Supported codepage and default character set page, when I click the green emerald I don’t get anything in the Supported codepages

Umm, that's strange. Are you sure your glyphs have Unicode values assigned to them?
What happens if you press the green diamond on the 'Unicode ranges' page?

I believe you have to have all the characters in a codepage for the "green emerald" to do its trick.

Miguel, If you mean the 'Supported Unicode ranges' page, when I press the green emerald I get selected ticks for entries like Basic Latin, Latin1-Supplement and Latin Extended-A. like this

Paul is right - which means you'll need to manually specify some codepage support. That's what's used to determine which general menu section the fonts go in.

T

'manually specify some codepage support' - could you explain ?

In reply to Paul question, I do have all the characters in the code page.

s.

I have just recently upgraded to Fontlab studio. I had never noticed this problem in 4.5, so I opened this font in 4.5 and tried the green diamond on the Supported codepage and default character set page and default character set page and it worked the supported codepages appear in there correct place.

Is this a bug in Studio ?

Hi all,

I've just tested the family in InDesign on a PC and it works fine, does this make any sense to anyone or suggest a soultion to the situation when testing on the mac.

s.

>I had never noticed this problem in 4.5, so I opened this font in 4.5 and tried the green diamond on the Supported codepage and default character set page and default character set page and it worked the supported codepages appear in there correct place.

That's why I found it strange. I had also used the green diamond with success in FLv4.6

>Is this a bug in Studio ?

Maybe not. Perhaps it's a change of behavior from FL4.x to FLS. Might be documented in the manual.

>‘manually specify some codepage support’ - could you explain ?

Instead of pressing the green diamond, you might need to selectively add the codepage entries to the "Supported codepages" field, by pressing the button with the arrow pointing right. (Your image attached)

>>Is this a bug in Studio ?
> Maybe not. Perhaps it’s a change of behavior
> from FL4.x to FLS. Might be documented in the manual.

It is an intended change of behavior. In FontLab 4.x, the automatic algorithm was too generous. The spec requires all characters from a certain codepage to be present if a certain flag is to be enabled -- but FontLab 4.x's tolerance was too much. In FontLab Studio 5, the alrgorithm requires about 95% of the characters from a certain codepage in order to flag it.

If in Studio 5, pressing the green button gives you no codepages at all, it seems that the character set of your font is pretty incomplete or that there is some other problem with your .vfb file. You may want to contact us at http://www.fontlab.com/contact/

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
Fontlab Ltd.

Hi all,

Thanks for the replies everyone, it's really helping with my steep learning curve of FL.

Miguel - I've tried selectively adding the codepages, but still the same problem.

Adam - I'm sure I have all the required characters for the codepage.
As a test I removed all unicode, then Generated names for all glyphs and then Generated Unicode again.
I contacted Fontlab through there problem report page, but on sending I kept getting a error page saying the page wasn't sent. I didn't include any zip files cos they were over the 250KB allowed.
I did send the same information to orders@fontlab.com, but I don't know if this will get through to the correct department ?

s.

Send the stuff to contact at fontlab dot com

A.

Sorry my mistake, that's where I did send it.

s.

>I’m sure I have all the required characters for the codepage.

Are you *really* sure? I don't see the default fractions (¼ ½ ¾) for example.
That image was taken in 'Unicode ranges' mode. Switch to 'Codepages' mode and see if your glyphset covers 95% of the yellow-tagged codepoints.

Good thread. There is a wiki in this somewhere.

ChrisL

Yes in 'Codepages Mode' not all the characters are there. Are you saying that I need to complete the rest of the characters. If so what would be in the top cells that have no templates to illustrate what should go there?

Is it not possible to have fonts with characters missing and still have them work correctly ?

As 'dezcom' mentioned this is a great thread, but my problem is that the font name appears at the bottom of the font list, are the missing characters related to this ?, or is just that the green diamond won't work with characters missing ?

Thanks again everyone for your input.

s.

>Are you saying that I need to complete the rest of the characters.

Yes, but just the ones that have templates, plus a few others. That said, you should add:
-- 0000 (.notdef)*
-- 00A0 (nbspace) Make it a composite of 0020 (space)
-- 00AD (sfthyphen) Make it a composite of 002D (hyphen)
-- The remaining ones that have template

*Also, make this the "PFM Default character"

Another thing I noticed, you have the Euro glyph (€) encoded as U+00A4, when it should be in U+20AC. U+00A4 is normally used by currency (¤).

>Is it not possible to have fonts with characters missing and still have them work correctly ?

Yes, but it's much easier to make them work when there are no characters missing :)

>but my problem is that the font name appears at the bottom of the font list, are the missing characters related to this ?

As Thomas said, some applications, like InDesign for example, rely on the Codepage information present in fonts, to order them on the menus.

>or is just that the green diamond won’t work with characters missing ?

As Adam explained, pressing the green diamond will only produce results if most of the characters for a given Codepage are present.

Miguel thanks for those gems.

*Also, make this the “PFM Default character”

I'm assuming PFM is 'Printer Font Metrics', so how would I make the .notdef
the “PFM Default character” ?

s.

>so how would I make the .notdef the “PFM Default character” ?

Go to the panel "Encoding and Unicode" in Font Info window.

I'm not entirely sure that PFM means ‘Printer Font Metrics’ in this case. I think that field refers to the 'usDefaultChar' entry of the OS/2 table.
http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/opentype/index_os2.html#dc

Essentially, this will be the character that a given application will display, whenever a requested character is not present in the font. For example, let's say I'm using your font and type the Greek letter α (alpha). Because your font does not support Greek, the usDefaultChar will be displayed.
Now, it's not very useful to assign the character 'space' (U+0020) to this character, because this way it's not (visually) obvious that a character is not present and is being replaced.

The .notdef glyph can take many shapes. You'll find some examples on this page:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/recom.htm

Miguel - thanks again for this invaluable input.

My problem with the font name position is still there. I produced this font in Fontographer and then opened the bmap file from Fontographer in FL to complete the character set and generate the opentype format, is it possible that this has something to do with this problem.

s.

After all the insights, I can't think of other problems your fonts might have. In any case, here's a short (and most certainly incomplete) list of things to check:
-- The OS font cache is clean (there are no old versions of the fonts in memory)
-- The fonts have all the characters for the following Codepages (the ones between parenthesis can be omitted, I think)
• 1252 Latin 1
• 1250 Latin 2: Eastern Europe
(• 1254 Turkish)
(• 1257 Windows Baltic)
-- The Codepages above are included in the 'Supported codepages' field

If your fonts still line-up at the bottom of the menus after these steps, try to add the codepage '1253 Greek', as Karsten suggested. I think I recall a bug where this codepage need to be flagged, when the codepage '1250 Latin 2: Eastern Europe' was present (or when characters from that codepage were present), even if the font/typeface had no coverage for Greek.

A clarification on the .notdef glyph:
A couple posts above, I told you to put this glyph in the 'slot' 0000. This is in fact incorrect, as that glyph would be encoded as U+0000 (uni0000). The correct way is to give that glyph the name '.notdef', and leave the Unicode field blank, as shown in the image bellow.

Miguel-

- Clean cache with Font Finagler
- All characters in those codepages
- Added Greek to supported codepages
- Changed the .notdef

Still no change with font list placing.

I've sent a problem report to Fontlab with all vfb. files, so hopfully they may see a problem I've missed

s.

On a non-Latin note, I'm wondering what custom properties I need to set in the "non-English or special font names" name table if I wish to include the Thai name of a font inside the font file. Entry 16: preferred font family allows me to select various encodings/scripts. Is it just a matter of selecting Thai and typing the Thai name in the custom field?

Is it worth doing this? Would this then appear as the default font name on Thai operating systems?