Questions

Thanks to Thomas for his reply to my earlier questions. As of known today, is there any language not supported by OTF? I know the key issue is whether that language supports Unicode format. Can someone share some insight on this topic? Any input is appreciated. Yanling

Given: MyFont Regular MyFont Caption Regular MyFont Subhead Regular MyFont Display Regular which all have the same weight, width and style, what values do you supply for Postscript and TTF names to cause the operating system and apps to see these fonts as individual fonts and as members of one family. I have in mind the Adobe Pro Optical OTFs which show up in a font menu under one family name, with the individual typefaces appearing in the families' sub menu.

hello, I got a very old postscript font that has many not standard chars and i would like some advice as how i should treat them. rperiodsuperior (r.) rsperiodsuperior (rs.) speriodsuperior (s.) Dapostrophe (D') Oapostrophe (O') apostrophec ('c) apostrophes ('s) As for the first three ones I suposed they should be special kerning pairs for Mr. Mrs. and Ms. As for D' or 'c i have no idea where to apply them. As for O' i can think of O' in irish family names. And 's as an special kerning pair for third person of to be. Besides, it has as well oneromannumeral (I), fiveromannumeral (V) and tenromannumeral (X). The question is where should i classify this ligatures. as hist or dlig? and the roman numbers? t

Dear FDK developers, how can I build an OTF font that has a 4.238 and 1.29 cmap? And how do I "enter" those cmaps into the font? Is this possible with FDK? Is there a list of all .fpr commands available somewhere? Some of them such as mac_cmap_script_id or mac_cmap_lang_id are not available from the GUI, and aren't listed. Are there others? Adam

I'm working on Hebrew fonts (practically, finished). I would like them to contain a full roman-character-set glyphs. Is there any royalty-free Roman font I can use for that? Thank you Arieh Marzel

I posted an InDesign conversion-related question a while back. Now my client has decided to switch from Quark and PageMaker to InDesign 2.0. Now my quesitons is, for Greek, we now use Helvetica Greek family (like upright, bold, inclined, etc. on the Mac). Is the equivalent OTF font set already available? Or, if not, can I convert my current TTF to OTF using the FDK? I installed the FDK on my Mac (OS9.2.2), but was unable to get it to work. I also checked this forum but could not find anything helpful. Would like to see some enlightening suggestions from those who have already experienced this. Thanks a million!!! Yanling Yao

Is there any way to use OpenType fonts with OS 9?

can be obtained the ClassKern tool used to create the .kern files in the examples for OT creation? -t

First of all a big thank to Thomas. I took the fontinfo file in the Example Fonts Folder (specifically the AGaramond Pro one). There is a lot of information there that i dont know if it is needed for OT creation. Particularly, AscenderHeight, LcHeight, FigureHeight, DescenderDepth, etc. and all the overshoots for these values. I know that all this information can be obtain from the BlueValue entry in the private dictionary, but is all this information really needed if, in fact, you can find it there? And, if all these information is needed can you tell me where i can find the fontinfo file specification? -t

Dear OT devs, Might someone explain me the dpng feature syntax? It is not documented in the OT specification. TIA -t

The Compare Family proofing tool that is part of the FDK is certainly a very useful app. and I have the habit to run it after compiling a font or family. There is however one test that I dont fully understand and it seems that it is not part of the documentation. This is the family test 11 that checks Mac and Win menu names. If you e.g. run the test on the Myriad Pro family, you will get the following report: ------------------------- Family Test 11: Check that Mac and Windows menu names differ for all but base font, and are the same for the base font. Error: Styled font Mac and Windows Compatible Names should differ, but do not. Myriad Pro Black Myriad Pro Black ------------------------- How should this be interpreted? Thanks, /mårten

It seems that Adobe has changed the scheme for glyph naming in the latest wave of fonts. E.g. the naming of SC where before Asmall etc., but is now A.sc and a.sc, right? The GlyphOrderAndAliasDB file in the latest FDK has this changes implemented in a three column mapping instead of two columns used before. But in this file the naming is: a.sc Asmall uniF761 Instead of: a.sc A.sc uniF761 which is what Adobe seems to use in the latest wave of fonts. The question: is there a later GOAADB file available? Related: the useage of three columns in this file is not documented in the latest makeOTF.pdf as I can see. Thanks, /mårten

Hallo, it is a real problem for a rip software if one glyph is very wide? InDesign and Acrobat have no problems with it. >Single Face Test 15: Warn if Font BBox x/y coordinates are improbable. >Warning: BBox X-Max is out of range for Font ... > BBox.xmax: 3884 It`s an ornament glyph - not commenly used and not usable to cute it into two pieces. Andreas

I'm really interested in creating fonts, but find it difficult building letters using bezier tools I figure there must be much more precise ways to figure out curves and create consistant shapes. Anyone know a good book, dvd, or web resource for this kind of learning? Something that goes really deep down into the subject? Thanks in advance for anyone that can spare a little time and insight.

There will be an update of the FDK released at ATypI next Thursday. The new version should be online around the same time or not long after. New features: - CompareFamily now works on TrueType fonts - Unicode encoding can be independent of glyph names - various bug fixes

The FDK sample files, as well as OT fonts that Adobe has shipped, declares a Latin language with the abbreviation "TUR" as an exception for some ligature lookups. Turkish is abbreviated as TRK, as specified in the OT spec: The spec. says that Microsoft uses these tag names. Does this mean that each vendor can use its own language tags? And how should applications know what the tags mean if they are not part of a known standard? Speaking of language system tags; does Indy 2 or Photoshop 7 recognize those? I made some tests and couldnt see any difference when lookups where preceded by a language declaration or not. /mårten

The user guide to the Indy2 plug-in "EditOTFMetrics", bundled with FDK, states that the plug-in can handle metric editing for MM fonts and that an extra menu for selecting masters will appear in the EOM toolbar. This extra menu don't show up when I load an OT kerning file and select a MM font so I suppose that the OT kerning file must have a special MM syntax which I can't find in the FDK documentation. Any ideas? /mårten

The technical note "OpenType tables used by Windows"<br /> http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/type/otfdk/<br /> techdocs/OT_tables_in_Win_ATM.html<br />says that the <kern> table (Kerning) is "Ignored". Is it true? Does the ATM<br />driver really ignore "flat" kerning?<br /><br />Also, are there any significant updates for Windows 2000 and XP? (I think<br />the ATM font driver built in Windows 2000 and XP is referred to as "5.0" --<br />true?)<br /><br />Adam

What is an open type font? I will assume a new format like TT / T1 / MM...yes?

I have a problem with the panose settings. For example I have defined a string in the os2 table like this "Panose 2 0 8 6 5 0 0 2 0 3;". The result after generation is "Panose 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0;". Any comments? Andreas Seidel

MakeOTF adds "normal" synthetic glyphs to italic fonts too - is this a bug or a feature? (operator "IsItalicStyle" is set to "true") Andreas Seidel

two questions 1. Since the step from 1.4 to 1.5 my old font folder is no more accepted by MakeOTF. It stops compiling the font by the status "Running txlib...". Him - I downloaded the examples and all works fine. So I`d copied my fonts paths into the "Example Font Sources" directory and MakeOTF runs like MakeOTF 1.4 before. But how can I change the path - so MakeOTF will operate from each path my font files stored? 2. How can I apply my vendor ID to the font - of course I can extract the table form the font, can use an hex editor and place it back. But I like to do it with MakeOTF. I have checked the adobe samples and the vendor id is ADBE in the final font. But I haven't find any code in the feature files changing this value. If I compile my own fonts the result is UKWN - unknown. The values from the source pfa and fontinfo file will be ignored by MakeOTF. (I use the Windows SDK) Andreas Seidel

Dear FDK team, I think a utility that assigns the appropriate file/creator types to OTF fonts for use on a Mac would be a great addition to the Mac version of the FDK. Or is it already included? Adam

Hm... Pity I'm not first here... Anyway. I've noticed that you didn't include the font.ps for AGaramondPro or Minion Pro, and cidfont.ps for Kozuka. Kozuka Mincho Pro Acro R and Kozuka Mincho Std R are included in InDesign 2.0 US Trial and InDesign 2.0 CE Trial. In addition, 4 styles of Minion Pro and 4 styles of Myriad Pro are included in InDesign 2.0 CE Trial. Hence, at least one style of the Kozuka font and one style of the Minion Pro font are easily and freely available for evaluation purposes. For that reason, I think it would be very helpful if Adobe included the complete sources for these fonts in the FDK distribution. This would help developers in learning the tool by building the first font from the provided sources. Adam

Welcome to the forum. A couple of people have pointed out that most people are unable to post messages via the newsgroup or on the Web. We're looking into this, and I hope to have this resolved by Monday. To create new threads on the Web interface, you should see an "Add Topic" link. It appears that you *can* currently reply to existing threads. Sorry for the inconvenience. T