Hello,
I'm finally in the coding stage of making my first really extensive font, including small caps, Russian and Greek (which will include polytonic). But I'm no OpenType codemaster. So in order to get my font to actually work, and do all the tricky little things like convert Turkish and polytonic Greek correctly to small caps, etc., I decided to use this strategy: I opened up a similarly extensive font that I have, and planted all my characters into it, so I could use code that was already proven.
But the ranges of glyphs don't match exactly, so I'm left with a bunch of code that applies to Vietnamese glyphs and such that don't exist in my font. So I have a few questions:
1. Is this whole strategy a dishonest thing to do? (I personally don't see it as stealing code—I look at it like this: the coders who came before me blazed the trail in figuring out the right way to code all this. I'm just repeating what they figured out, as if they'd discovered a useful math equation and I were employing it. But maybe this isn't the prevailing way to look at it in the type design community. That's what I want to know.) Or perhaps, is it an ill-fated strategy, where I'm bound to end up tangling myself up in a confusing mess?
2. If it's okay to proceed on my current path, is it possible in FontLab to delete a bunch of characters and, at the same time, delete all references to them in the font's OpenType features file? Because as it is, when I try to compile, FontLab insists on creating new copies of all the characters that I had just deleted, and won't compile if I tell it not to do that.
3. If I should really be doing this from scratch, can someone point me to a place where I can learn how to build my code from zero, and understand it, and have it do everything it needs to do in order to function as a professionally usable OpenType font?
Thanks a million!
—Nathanael
