Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion

I have moved this discussion out of the Roundhead font collaboration thread so we can continue to discuss this here, as I think this is an interesting discussion but perhaps was taking the other thread off course.

Rather than having them as extra characters of an OTF which is not supported by Xara would be possible to map them to keyboard symbols that are usable in Xara programs?

Full support for open type fonts is something that has been asked for on the forums but I don't think we will be seeing it anytime soon, providing regular keyboard access, even if it has to be an Alt +numberpad code to these extra glyphs would be better IMO at least.

Frances, to my knowledge only Xara 3D does not support Open Type Fonts. I use them often in Designer Pro.

@Bill: What I meant by full support for open type fonts that Xara does not have is for the extra glyphs that some times come with open type fonts, for example you can get a free copy of Megalopolis Extra from Smeltery Fonts this font contains a bunch of extra glyphs for swashes, alternate letters, etc, that are not uni coded. No Xara programs have the capabilities to access these extra glyphs. And this is what has been asked for on the forums, however as so far the only programs that I know of that can access these extras are Adobe programs I'm guessing this may be proprietary technology and it may not be possible for Xara to have this functionality for who knows how long.

So what I would like to see with our TG fonts is for ALL glyphs to be accessible by regular keyboard means so they are accessible in all Xara programs.

The Microsoft Windows code page 1252 Western (ANSI) is shown in this image

allows for 218 characters including the space character. The cells blacked out cannot be accessed using a standard US or UK keyboard. All other cells can be accessed by the normal keys or by the Alt+xxxx key combination.
http://btaylor.50megs.com/218-characters.png
Download the full size image http://btaylor.50megs.com/218-characters.png

This image shows the decimal number associated with the characters. For example if you want to place a copyright symbol © in a document you would hold the Alt key down hit 0 then the 3 digits 169 shown in the image.

http://btaylor.50megs.com/218-decimal.png
Download full size image http://btaylor.50megs.com/218-decimal.png
I hope I did make this more confusing than it would normanly be for anyone. :)

The endash and emdash have their place within the character set. We can create a short space however in TrueType and OpenType fonts the space will resize to a small with by design. If we need a smaller (narrower) space we can create it in FontLab.

A non-breaking space is an HTML concept and not something that can be created within FontLab that I have been able to figure out.

If anyone needs an explanation of any thing I have tried to say please don't hesitate to ask.

As long as we can keep all glyphs in the TG fonts that we create accessible with Xara programs I think that will be great. However Open type fonts can contain literally thousands of glyphs that can be used to provide extra features.

Here is an example of what I mean by full support of open type features that Xara does not have.

http://www.howdesign.com/resources-t...e-on-opentype/

Frances Unicode TrueType fonts can contain thousands of glyphs. The Megalopolis Extra font only contains a few hundred glyphs. I'm still examining it to see what exactly is making the extra glyphs unaccessable within a Xara application. So far the extra glyphs are also unaccessable within Photoshop CS as well as DP7.

Technically speaking the difference between a TrueType and an OpenType font is the OpenType uses EPS outlines. That difference does not allow for the ligatures in and of itself. There are ttf fonts that also contain floureshes and some ligatures there seems to be some differences that I have not discovered yet.

As long as we can access all the glyphs in the collaboration fonts in Xara I am happy :)

Hi Bill,

According to Wikipedia, the non-breaking space is "Windows (all applications) Alt+0160 or Alt+255 (on numeric keypad)" which, not surprisingly, shows up as empty on the keyboard layout you uploaded. Whether the character is actually generated by the OS, or by FontLab or the font pixies, I don't know.

The non-breaking hyphen is U+2011.

I've seen it said that the non-breaking hyphen can be accessed by Alt+2011 but that has never worked for me.

I am interested in hearing what you discover about why the extra features in that font (megolopolis extra) are not accessible.

Also if we are creating a font with ligatures would it be possible to have that as a TT font for use with X3D or would the ligatures have to be in an OT version only?

Barbara the wiki article I found for non-breaking space http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space states it only works in applications that support it's use. Back in the late 1970s, early 1980s this was better known as a hard space and was available in Word Star and most other word processors of that time. TeX, LaTeX, SGML, and HTML are plain text that also recognize the hard space.

Frances the number of ligatures depends on how many of the extra characters you want the font to support. Do we need † or ‡ for example. Is there a need for ¶ or § and how often to we use ¦ in our work? Are there many people that use « and » �in their designs?

As to why the extra characters in some OpenType fonts are not accessable in Xara Designer Pro it is a relatively new feature available in OpenType font creation and is not available in many applications. The programming required to create the feature within the font is not widely understood by font designers. In the reference book for font design I have the author states he does not understand the programming and usually copies the code from font to font. I am searching for more information about the OpenType features.

This link is supposed to be a simplified way of creating OpenType fonts: http://www.bergsland.org/2011/11/typ...ts-simplified/

Hi Bill.
If we can find out how to create the non-breaking space -- Xara Designer is one of the products that does recognize it.

I typed the following in Xara Designer Pro:

Xara Designer Pro Xara Designer Pro

The first Xara Designer Pro has Alt+255 (number pad numbers) between the three words that make up the name. The second one does not. If you resize the text box the first Xara Designer Pro acts like it is one word and the second will wrap between the words.

This post editor doesn't recognize non-breaking space when entered from the keyboard as Alt+255, so you can't see it working here, but when directly entered in Xara Designer non-breaking spaces do work!

Barbara as long as an application recognized the non-breaking space we can include it within the font. We can copy the space and paste it into the correct cell for the hard space.

In the Ariel font Alt+0160 is the Non-Breaking Space.

Super!

Folks who do HTML coding should be useing the HTML entity   to produce the space, but anyone doing DTP in a program that recognizes it really benefits from having it in the font.

I commonly use non-breaking spaces to keep proper names, or dates together so that they are always on the same line and are read as a unit.

1. OpenType fonts come in two flavors: with TrueType outlines (.ttf extension, they are backwards compatible to TrueType fonts) and with PostScript outlines (.otf extension). Apart from the sort of outlines used to construct glyphs, these flavors are interchangeable and have the same abilities.

2. Any OpenType font can (but does not have to) include OpenType Layout features. OpenType Layout features are a mechanism to style your text with different glyphs than the default ones provided by the font. For each character (e.g. a letter), alternate glyphs can be included in the font. Those alternate glyphs can represent one character (e.g. a small-cap A or a swash A) or more characters (e.g. an fi or st ligature).

3. For many non-European scripts (such as Arabic or Indic), OpenType Layout features are applied automatically during typesetting, without the user's intervention. In that case, the alternate glyphs are necessary for correct orthographic rendering of that script.

4. For European scripts, some applications allow the user to selectively enable and disable features. Rather than inserting the alternate glyphs directly, the user would typically choose an appropriate feature, i.e. a styling function. There is a registered set of OpenType Layout features and each has a particular purpose, for example one is for replacing uppercase letters with small-cap letters, another for replacing lining (uppercase) figures with oldstyle (lowercase) figures, another for common ligatures, another for rare ligatures, yet another for swashes, others for so-called stylistic sets (which can be arbitrary decorative or special-purpose variants) and so on. Enabling a feature replaces the default glyphs with some alternate glyphs (depending on which feature is enabled), or repositions the glyphs (e.g. shifts them up or increases spacing).

5. OpenType Layout is not a proprietary technology. It is part of the international standard ISO/IEC 14496-22.

6. Many applications enable user-controlled OpenType Layout features, for example on Windows Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Publisher 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6, Serif Page Plus X6, QuarkXPress 9, Microsoft Expression Blend, Adobe Flash, and quite a few others. On Mac OS X, all applications that use the system Fonts palette can use OpenType Layout features.

7. It's not completely trivial for software developers to add support for user-controlled OpenType Layout features, mostly because the developers need to add a user interface for the features, and they need to make changes to their application's text storage system so that the application "knows" which features have been enabled on which text. But "under the hood", adding support for them is not complicated. Windows includes a system library called Uniscribe which provides a programming API that allows developers to apply user-controlled OpenType Layout features to the text.

8. With the release of Corel DRAW Graphics Suite X6, the two most popular drawing applications for Windows (Adobe Illustrator and Corel DRAW) have support for user-controlled OpenType Layout features. Xara is clearly lagging behind. I'd encourage the Xara developers to consider adding comprehensive OpenType Layout support in the next generation of their software.

9. I'm an OpenType and font development expert and am potentially available for consulting services in that area.

Regards,
Adam Twardoch
http://www.twardoch.com/

Thanks Adam and welcome to TalkGraphics.

Yes, thanks Adam for the explanations, And Welcome to Talkgraphics!

Hello Adam,

Welcome to TalkGraphics. We are very honored to have you stop by and share your knowledge with us.

Adam is currently the Product and Marketing Manager for FontLab LTD, and on staff as a "glyph wrangler' and typographic researcher, and resident OpenType and Unicode expert at Bitstream's MyFont.com. He previously has been a typographic and technical consultant for Microsoft, Linotype GmbH, a subsidiary of Montotype Imaging and Tiro Typeworks.

With your vast experience in the world of typography, fonts and foundries do you have any advice or criticism you can give us on the Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG font we (members of the Font and Typography Forum here on TG) are about to release as a free font? Any technical or marketing advice would be greatly appreciated.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Barbara B;439802 With your vast experience in the world of typography, fonts and foundries do you have any advice or criticism you can give us on the [I

Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG[/I] font we (members of the Font and Typography Forum here on TG) are about to release as a free font? Any technical or marketing advice would be greatly appreciated.

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Welcome to TG Adam. It's good to have someone with your knowledge here, sounds like you will be a definite asset to the forum. I'll second what Barbara said.

Barbara,

I've taken a look at the most recent version of the Celebrated Burgeon Ornaments TG font. I think it’s a great effort, and the choice of assigning the glyphs to the plain ASCII codes is a reasonable one. The TTF format has a special way of encoding symbol fonts but I think it’s not a very reliable mechanism and is confusing to users. Also, the Symbol font encoding is not supported by OTF, so it’s very difficult to release a font with compatible encoding in both OTF and TTF.

I also definitely support the idea of releasing the font under the SIL Open Font License. I’ll post a few comments in the other thread.

Can someone bring me up to date -- does the new version of Xara Designer support all those Open Type glyphs? I'm looking at a font on Mighty Deals, but don't want to buy it if I can't use it in Xara...

I don't have version 10. But no, it doesn't support OT features.

And btw. If and when Xara does add OT features to at least XDP, I seriously hope they look at how icore it was implemented in CorelDraw. Claude really thought out how a drawing application should use OT features. It's elegant and simple for the user.