Glyph order in Adobe apps

Jani Paavola

Another case of "I've done this before, but now I cannot make it work"...

Which setting in Fontlab can I sort the glyphs for Adobe apps (Menu>Type>Glyphs)?
No need for all custom set, just not all random as I have it now. Alphabetical order would be nice.
I remember Typophile had an answer to this...  

Florian Hardwig

Choose Glyph / Sort Glyphs / By Unicode before generating the font.
Note that InDesign’s Glyph palette offers the user two ways of sorting; by CID/GID (default) and by Unicode.

Quoting John Hudson from a Typophile thread (sorry, no URL):

The modes in various tools are generally just ways of looking at glyphs in different orders. Index mode corresponds to the actual sequence of Glyph IDs in a font; that is, the order in which glyphs are stored in the glyf or CFF table. This order is generally something that you want to control, and to make intuitive for users of tools such as the InDesign glyph pallette that expose this order. There is no one correct order, but I recommend that you look at some fonts from major developers in the glyph pallette to see what kinds of approaches are used. Some foundries have a standard order for all their fonts; I tend to use a project-specific ordering since I'm making custom fonts and try to anticipate how specific users will want to work.

Jani Paavola

That does it, thank you Florian!

Kent Lew

But, Florian — if one selects Sort Glyphs > By Unicode, then in the InDesign Glyph palette, the sort by CID/GID and the sort by Unicode displays will be essentially the same, since the font will have been generated with a Glyph ID order equivalent to Unicode order. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Still, Florian is right — the key is to sort the font itself in the order you wish before generating. If you truly want alphabetical, then Glyph > Sort Glyphs > By Name will do that. (But alphabetical by glyph name, not by character, so something like Eth may not sort where one might want to see Ð.)

If you wish to manually adjust, then switch the Font window to Index mode and rearrange to taste. If you get an customized order that you’d like to propagate to other fonts, then you may wish to save the sorted order as an .enc file using Glyph > Glyph Names > Save Encoding.

(That file needs to live in your Application Support > FontLab > Encoding directory, but I think the Save Encoding dialog defaults to the proper location.)

With a font window in Names mode, you can select your custom encoding from the pop-up menu to view the font in this new order. (You may have to restart after saving the enc file.)

Then use Sort Glyphs > By Encoding to set the actual Glyph ID order to this custom encoding.

HTH.