Open type fonts extra glyphs and ligatures compatibility discussion

**angelize** · 15 April 2012, 11:01 PM

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

**Barbara B** · 16 April 2012, 03:41 AM

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.

**angelize** · 16 April 2012, 04:21 AM

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?

**Soquili** · 16 April 2012, 01:32 PM

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/

**Barbara B** · 16 April 2012, 08:24 PM

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!

**Soquili** · 17 April 2012, 12:13 AM

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.

**Barbara B** · 17 April 2012, 03:25 PM

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.