How to unencode in Fontographer

Donald Tarallo

Hello,

I am working on a typeface in Fontographer and I have decided to use some character slots for pictograms and not the character that was intended to be in the given slot. I was advised to unencode them. I have about 8 icons I want to do this with. They will replace characters like the Greek summation, product, and pi. I have searched and cannot find information on how to unencode in Fontographer. I am rather new to using font design software and the technology behind it. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

Don

Kent Lew

If you unencode them, then they won’t be replacements for summation, product, and pi, etc.

That is to say, if you want to be able to enter your pictograms into text by typing the key combinations for ∑ (opt-w), ∏ (shift-opt-p) and π (opt-p), then your glyphs need to be encoded with those corresponding codepoints.

This font behavior (hacking specific characters with shapes that are not actually representative of those characters) is generally discouraged, which is probably why you were advised not to encode them as such.

It has been a long time since I worked in Fontographer. You probably need to rename these glyphs so that they don’t get automatically encoded with the codepoint corresponding to those standard names. Or make new glyph slots with new names and without codepoints and move them into these instead.

I doubt there are very many people (if any) on this forum actively using Fontographer, so if you need step-by-step instructions on how to do something specifically in Fog, then you might get more detailed responses on the Fontographer Support forum: http://forum.fontlab.com/fontographer/

Kent Lew

Found a copy of Fog 5 on an old machine.

If you select a glyph in the Font view and go to Element menu > Selection Info ... then you’ll get a dialog box where you can edit the name and unicode value of the glyph. Deleting the unicode value will “unencode” it. You may also need to change the name to prevent automatic encoding upon generation.

That’s the short answer. But, as alluded to above, you’ll need to have a different strategy for making the glyph available for text input and display.

Donald Tarallo

Thank you Kent.