Typophile

Reverse Font Spacebar Blues

Type Historian

Hello,

I’m a Win 2000/FontLab 4.6 user. Several years ago, I worked with a mac-only type designer to convert his commercial mac PS fonts to PS and TT for win. Font technology has changed drastically since then!

Some of these fonts are based on reverse images [solid-rectangle background with transparent glyphs].

Win fully supports a solid-rectangle glyph in the spacebar cell—a very cool, intuitive feature to be preserved if possible.

When these fonts were first developed c1997, the mac OS in use at the time did not support a spacebar glyph. Experiments crashed the designer’s machine.

Now that OSX [theoretically?] supports win-generated TTFs, I’m concerned about spacebar glyphs after reading this info:

http://typophile.com/node/30303
http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/TTRefMan/RM07/appendixB.html

1) Is there a danger that a win-generated TT font with a glyph assigned to the spacebar cell would crash an OSX system?

2) Would PS-favor OT do a better job of supporting this glyph than TT?

3) Is there a FontLab setting, default character or CodePage combo for a win/mac solution with spacebar glyph support?

4) Is it likely that win support for spacebar glyphs will continue in the foreseeable future?

5) In FontLab’s Naming dialog, there is an option in the More Styles list labeled “negative.” This term is not defined in the manual. If I chose it, it does not stay selected.

Is it relevant to this kind of font? If so, how can I use it?

Many thanks for your help, Anna
—
The Type Heritage Project
Honoring the Genius of Type Designers
from Ancient Scribes to Digital Wizards

‹ Testing opentype (TTF) and (OTF) on a PC Monowidth characters in a font ›
glyphobet

I just tested this on my OSX 10.3 system. I made a font with a X-shaped contour in the space glyph in TTF format, and then installed the font on OSX. Using TextEdit (the simple text-editor that comes with OSX), I wrote out some text and then set it to use the font I’d just made. It showed the contour that I’d put in the space glyph as you would expect, everywhere there was a space character.

Type Historian

WOW! Thanks for your instant response, Glyphobet!

This news is even better than I expected in my Wildest Dreams—seems too good to be true. Thank you for your courage in testing your hypothesis.

Did you used FontLab to make this test font? If so, what encoding options did you choose?

Thanks again for your generous input, Anna

glyphobet

What can I say... I was curious. :) I used FontForge to make a Unicode-encoded font.

Type Historian

Now I’m wondering whether you tried to print your test text or embed the font in a PDF?

Thanks again, Anna
____

Honoring the Genius of Type Designers
From Ancient Scribes to Digital Wizards

Captured from web.archive.org on 18 Oct 2007. view this capture