Bhikkhu Pesala

David Perry said:

I particularly like the tools for creating/editing OT features in Font Creator.

The Visual OpenType Designer certainly makes it easier for non-professionals to add OpenType Features, but Professional font designers are probably more comfortable with coding. I know at least one FontCreator user who prefers to use the Code Editor, and I often use it myself too, although the visual approach is more convenient for seeing how things work.

Now that I have designed my fonts, I import scripts into the Code Editor, and maybe add a few lookup substitutions or change the precedence of lookups, but I don't often add new features. I do sometimes add new languages, which also requires some cut and paste in the Code Editor. The Visual Designer is great for testing if features work as designed. 

On this page it says that it was distributed by Microsoft, but has now been replaced by an updated version of TNR with the full Latin Extended Additional glyph coverage:

Times Extended Roman (TXR) was promulgated by Microsoft during the
early 2000's as a kind of stopgap measure due to the broad
implementation of Unicode throughout their system. Times New Roman
(TNR) did not yet cover the Unicode Latin Extended Additional area
that included many essential fonts needed by scholars of Buddhism,
most notably underdot characters. TXR was released with coverage of
this area.

However, with the release of Windows Vista and Office 2007 (and of
course, Win7 and Office 2010), Microsoft updated TNR to cover these
areas (and more, and with more refined technology), making TXR
redundant.

I received an email from  Basit Ali cc Syed Ahsan at Microsoft.com saying that TNR was OK in all typstyles (i.e. with the macron aligned over the stem).

I checked my copies, and found that only Times Ext Roman was correct. Times New Roman and Bold both have the macron centred over the L, as at fileformat.info, which is inconsistent with the italic and bold italic. 

Adrien Tétar said:

On Windows Lucida Sans Unicode would be a solid fallback.

I don't think so. On Windows 10 my Lucida Sans Unicode only has 8 of 256 glyphs in Latin Extended Additional. 

Here are some stats on how much difference decomposing all composites makes:

* 2,893 glyphs, 1298 composites, 79,653 points, 975,576 bytes
* 2,893 glyphs, zero composites, 173,282 points, 1,487,016 bytes

Hinting was applied using ttfautohint on exporting from FontCreator 10.1