Keyboard mapping a font?

[staggers]

Sorry if this is the wrong place, but I couldn't find one more appropriate.

I know someone who needs a font creating.

This will have all the standard stuff, plus a lot of symbols. Some of the symbols would just be modified versions of existing ones. Others have never existed before.

I know that once it's all created by whatever means, the font can then go into something like FontCreator, if it wasn't there already, in order to package it as a font.

As you can tell, I was already a little hazy on that, but where I'm completely stuck is, how can they then map particular key combinations on the keyboard to particular symbols?

Presumably, the key 'a' will produce 'a' in this font, but what about all these others?

The insistence is that the extra symbols MUST be available directly from the keyboard, using some previously unused logical sequence of combinations. But how?

I am completely mystified.



Any help in understanding all this will be VERY much appreciated.

Regards


Staggers.

[Soquili]

Hi Staggers

When I create a font it begins as a drawing in Xara Designer Pro as a single character (glyph) and is exported to an Adobe Illustrator .ai file type. Each letter of the font will be a single drawing and file export.

I use FontLab Studio where I import each file into a specific cell and that assigns it to a specific key for the selected encoding. The attached image shows a portion of FontLab Studio and a blank work area (a new project). What appears to be letters are simply placeholders to show which cell represents the keys on a keyboard.

[staggers]

[QUOTE=Soquili;436931What appears to be letters are simply placeholders to show which cell represents the keys on a keyboard.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for your reply.

Ah.....so in the case of all the greyed-out letters, take the 'A' for instance, then if I press the keyboard 'A', up on the screen will appear whatever I actually put in that box, if I changed it from an 'A'' for some reason. Is that right?

If so, what about other key combinations that I would have to add, in order to add symbols that have never existed before. (I can't tell from your pic how to cover all other eventualities.)

The problem I would have is that I would be having to replace the entire ordinary font set, and add a load more (~ 26 x2 for U/case L/case).

Ah wait..........does this mean I can put in all the normal stuff (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, punctuation, etc), but there are still places left where I could remove unwanted symbols and replace them with wanted ones, and these places have existing mappings on the keyboard?

Told you I was new at this!

Regards

Staggers.

[Gare]

Hi Staggers—

The answer is 'yes'. A keyboard, when it comes to mapping an installed typeface, is just an input device, and as Bill mentioned, most typefaces are mapped so that pressing a lowercase 'a' calls the corresponding character within the font one is using.

But consider that there are foreign language mappings in Unicode coded typefaces such as Ariel, and picture fonts don't display characters at all, but instead little pictures.

FontLab or the "daughter" program, Type Tool v3, can help you to do this. Or you might want to engage Bill, or other fairly accomplished font creator on this forum to help you accomplish your goal.

In theory, making a typeface is easy if not straightforward. But typefaces are actually little runtime programs that your operating system loads and runs, so there is some computer code (invisible stuff) that needs to be coded in correctly, or the font won't work.

Oh, and welcome to this area on tg!



My Best,

Gary

[staggers]

Thanks for the info, and thanks for the welcome. Have been over at WD for a couple of years now, and wouldn't you know it, as soon as I have a font-related question, I get directed over here to a new board. Nice when that happens.

As for engaging someone else, If ONLY! However, can't say much out loud, but this is being done for someone who is a retired academic, world-famous in their field, and has very precise requirements about what is wanted in every little character, as far as I can make out, but can't draw the glyphs as wanted. So this means sitting down with them and round trip editing all the symbols until they are what they want. And in your case, that means a 5000 mile round trip!

So, the symbols will be produced by a graphics guy I know. Once all the symbols have been produced - and this won't be in the next 5 minutes - then they'll need to be introduced to the font creation program we end up using. As for programming, I've been writing programs since 1972, but never anything involving fonts.

My next question was going to be what software you would think suitable for someone who is very computer / programming savvy, but not famous for knowing about the internals of fonts, as I believe I've demonstrated here?

We looked at Font Creator (Pro version) and I've just looked at Type Tool. Money isn't much of a problem at this price level (Font Lab Studio would be considered over the top), but ease of use for a newbie would be the main criterion. So would FontCreator pro at $200 be easier to use than TypeTool at $100?

Thanks for your time again.

Staggers.

PS, like the cat. Last night I discovered that one of mine has developed a suspicious-looking thickening of the waistline. The hussy.

[Gare]

Hi Staggers—

One of the areas that the Fonts and Typography section of tg addresses is fixing fonts, and if we stretch our imagination a little, I believe that building fonts falls into the general category. I posted a longish tutorial, a step-by-stepper, for FontLab, which more or less has the same UI as Type Tool >>> here <<< .

If you're good at 1.)tedium and 2.) following steps, I feel that Type Tool 3 might be your ticket, because the I/O between Xara and Type Tool is a good one. I've been using Font Lab since version 1 and can state without fear of contradiction that its drawing tools are harder than Xara's. At the same time, I acknowledge what you stated about you not personally doing the characters—you need Illustrator format for the characters, myfile.AI, and Xara can export to AI as clean as genuine Adobe Illustrator can.

In fact, a $4000 modeling program such as Autodesk Maya doesn't have the drawing tool ease that Xara has.

No, I played with FontCreator Pro, and yI see almost nothing that justifies the extra $100 over Type Tool. Type Tool is just a little gem; if you have the patience, you can generate a near-commercial quality font from it.

My Best,

Gary