Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
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.
Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion
Frances, to my knowledge only Xara 3D does not support Open Type Fonts. I use them often in Designer Pro.
Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
@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.
2 Attachment(s)
Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
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.
Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
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/
Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
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.
Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
As long as we can access all the glyphs in the collaboration fonts in Xara I am happy :)
Re: The tg Font Collaboration Thread
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.
Re: Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion
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?
Re: Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion
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/