Missing Glyphs from Times New Roman

[humphreyb89353625]

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.

[Jongware]

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.

[Dov Isaacs]

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

[humphreyb89353625]

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]

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.)