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humphreyb89353625
Known Participant
November 18, 2019
Question

Missing Glyphs from Times New Roman

  • November 18, 2019
  • 3 replies
  • 1649 views

I am working on a books about Welsh Geneaology. It uses a very specific character known as either 'Latin Small Letter Middle-Welsh V' or Unicode U+1EFD. This site – https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1efd/fontsupport.htm  – says that the character is supported by Times New Roman which is the font I am using for the rest of the book, but the character viewer (I'm on a Mac) only displays it in Cardo (a specialist font), Baskerville and Geneva. The Cardo is pretty good, but for some reason using Cardo changes the line height, so is a no go. How can I add the special symbol to my current Times New roman font? On an iMac running InDesign CC.

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    3 replies

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    humphreyb89353625Author
    Known Participant
    November 20, 2019

    Thanks for the replies – I have done a workaround using the free Cardo font along the lines suggested by _jongware_. However, having nearly sorted that, I find there are half a dozen instances of the charater in bold face. I have tried to redownload Cardo from a couple of places, but I can't seem to find the character in a bold iteration of the Cardo font. Any idea if I can find if it even exists?

    Jongware
    Community Expert
    JongwareCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 21, 2019

    Well ... font designers are under no obligation to create additional italic, bold, or both, versions of their fonts -- and if they do, to make three more versions of *all* of their characters. You can always try to find a contact address for the designer and ask them, but be prepared for a "no" (if it's too much work) and/or a bill for a 'custom design'.

     

    Here is another option for you: draw it yourself! With the free demo of IndyFont you can only create one-character fonts but for your purposes, that is exactly enough! Copy the Regular character into IndyFont, convert to outlines, then alter the outlines to make it appear bolder. Save as a new font (containing just this one character) and then you can use this where you need it in bold.

     

    (Disclaimer: I didn't mention IF earlier because you already found a workable solution for your original rare character, as I have a commercial interest in this: I wrote IF.)

    Dov Isaacs
    Dov Isaacs
    Legend
    November 18, 2019

    The version of Times New Roman that ships with Windows is a dramatic superset of what ships with MacOS. It has over 5000 glyphs. To make matters worse, each update to Windows seems to yield a slightly different version of Times New Roman with even more glyphs.

     

    Licensing issues aside, it is very non-trivial to “add” a glyph to a font. It isn't just a matter of cut-and-paste.

     

               - Dov

    - Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
      Jongware
      Community Expert
      JongwareCommunity Expert
      Community Expert
      November 18, 2019

      It seems the information on FileFormat is based on the very latest version of Microsoft's Times New Roman – the one that comes (and updates) with Windows.

      Generally speaking, it's not easy (nor allowed by a font's EULA) to "add" a character to a font. However, if you have fonts that do contain the correct character, you can add a GREP Style to you paragraph style(s) to use another font for just this one character. Short explanation: create a Char Style that sets the font and have the GREP Style match only this one character.

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