Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion

[angelize]

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

[Barbara B]

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.

[wizard509]

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.

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.

[adamtwar]

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.

[jon404]

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...

[mwenz]

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

[mwenz]

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.