What's your standard glyph set/coverage?

Laurensius Adi
Laurensius Adi Posts: 45
in Technique and Theory
Curious how everyone determine their standard glyph/character set for a font.
I also need one for myself, but don't know how to determine them.
For example in Fontlab: ISO 8859-1 Latin 1, Windows 1252 ANSI, MacOS Roman, OpenType Standard, etc.

Would you mind to share yours?

Thank you.

Comments

  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 798
    2nd, despite all recommendations at the end you’ll have to work it out for yourself because it depends on the intended use target of your fonts.


  • Laurensius Adi
    Laurensius Adi Posts: 45
    @Andreas Stötzner Thanks!
  • Laurensius Adi
    Laurensius Adi Posts: 45
    edited March 2021
    Just done reading the thread there.
    I totally forgot about Google Fonts! I've been there before. I think this is a good starting point.
    Here's the link
    Also there's this https://github.com/tphinney/font-tools

    Hope this helps others too.



  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    Following the first link to Google Fonts, I find that the characters for IJ and ij are considered to be "compatibility characters". And so there is no Unicode representation for ij with an acute accent as a single precomposed glyph. Which means that the only way to support the character is through the use of complicated OpenType features.
  • Laurensius Adi
    Laurensius Adi Posts: 45
    @John Savard I don't really use Glyphs, the tips there written specifically for Glyphs, I use Fontlab. I only found the 'nice names' encoding useful and copy paste it.

    So, what's your suggestion for that? As I haven't make any font with that character yet.
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    If you are looking for FontLab Latin encoding files... http://www.thomasphinney.com/2014/03/fontlab-latin-encoding/

    Set of files, matches the Adobe standard character sets as of 2014, with an update in 2017. May not be up to date with the very latest currency symbols and tweaks, though.
  • Claudio Piccinini
    Claudio Piccinini Posts: 681
    Laurensius said:
    Curious how everyone determine their standard glyph/character set for a font.
    I also need one for myself, but don't know how to determine them.
    For example in Fontlab: ISO 8859-1 Latin 1, Windows 1252 ANSI, MacOS Roman, OpenType Standard, etc.

    Would you mind to share yours?

    Thank you.
    Andreas is right, but since I have had to decide myself recently (and still fine-tuning it), I tell you how I proceeded.
    For the basic encoding, more or less I decided to include all that is grouped  the "Opentype Standard" Encoding.
    Then you can turn to Unicode Pages and see what is more relevant for you. The Controls and Basic Latin and Latin 1 Supplement ranges are already covered by the "Opentype Standard", then you might decide how much of Latin Extended-A and B you want to include, depending on the intended language coverage of your basic versions.
    I added the most important Combining Diacritical Marks (0300-036F), selected glyphs from General Punctuation (2000-206F), the numerals from Superscripts and Subscripts (2070-209C), for now just the Euro from the Currency Symbols range (20A0-20BF) but I might add some, and so on.
    I think arrows can be useful, so you could consider to add the basic ones from 2190-21FF, and so on… Just parse the various typographic signs/symbols ranges and see what you find more relevant to include in your standard basic set.
    Then one can create more extended sets with specific or more complete uses in mind.
  • Claudio Piccinini
    Claudio Piccinini Posts: 681
    Andreas Stötzner said:
    2nd, despite all recommendations at the end you’ll have to work it out for yourself because it depends on the intended use target of your fonts.
    A great thread you started, which helped me a lot to understand, and clarify my approach. Thanks! :)
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    Were I a font designer, another recent discussion here would lead me to add U+2010 and U+2212, the symbols for "hyphen" and "minus sign" (as distinct from -, which is "hyphen-minus") to my list. So the vagaries of Unicode will suggest some characters, such as the directed quotes, that it's easy to forget about, but which really should be considered even before one combs the world's Latin-script languages for accented letters.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    I don't remember where I found the original Excel file I join.

    I adapted the file to my needs: Latin European languages, Win and/or Word alt-codes, Fontlab 7 names.

    I used the "Bulletproof" and "Alphabet Type" apps (Windows 10 for me) to help me fine tune the needed characters.

    At the moment, I create fonts supporting: Afrikaans, Albanian, Alsatian, Aromanian, Asturian, Breton, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, French, Gagauz, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Turkish, Walser German, West Frisian, Zazaki, Zulu.
    (Not all exactly European)

    I'm looking forward to support Onĕipŏt!  ;) 
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    I upload a corrected file. Seems I forgot some Fontlab names.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    And I found the origin of tha table:
    https://fontmeme.com/alt-codes-shortcuts-html-codes-for-special-characters/
    where you find also the html and Mac codes
  • Laurensius Adi
    Laurensius Adi Posts: 45
    Yves Michel said:

    I used the "Bulletproof" and "Alphabet Type" apps (Windows 10 for me) to help me fine tune the needed characters.
    Where could I find those apps? Thanks.

  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    My mistake. No apps but online tools.
    I don't care if they steal my fonts (it's a risk!) They are already pirated! 

    https://bulletproof.italic.space/
    https://www.alphabet-type.com/tools/
  • Claudio Piccinini
    Claudio Piccinini Posts: 681
    Yves Michel said:
    My mistake. No apps but online tools.
    I don't care if they steal my fonts (it's a risk!) They are already pirated! 

    https://bulletproof.italic.space/
    https://www.alphabet-type.com/tools/
    They seem pretty useful, thanks! May I ask why you listed the "Fontlab names"? Aren’t these an internal software thing?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    Glyph names are a (near?) universal convenience in font editors, and required in OpenType CFF (1) fonts, but optional for OpenType TTF/CFF2 fonts.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    Claudio Piccinini said:
    They seem pretty useful, thanks! May I ask why you listed the "Fontlab names"? Aren’t these an internal software thing?
    Remember it's a table I use to check my fonts on Fontlab 7. It helps me when my font is alphabetically displayed by names. If one doesn't use them, one can eliminate them, of course.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,135
    Thomas Phinney said:
    Glyph names are a (near?) universal convenience in font editors, and required in OpenType CFF (1) fonts, but optional for OpenType TTF/CFF2 fonts.

    There are glyph names inside fonts? As they're not needed for printing, don't they waste bytes on disk?
    Just because today's computers have more than 64 kilobytes of memory, and hard disk drives larger than 5 megabytes... in fact, today, the level 2 caches in modern microprocessors are often 4 to 8 megabytes... is surely no excuse to be wasteful!
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    edited May 2021
    Short answer: yes, it adds to the file size.

    But as has been discussed many times on this forum, there are some inefficiencies and duplicated data in the original OpenType CFF format. Which is why CFF2 was invented: there was a need to support variable fonts in OpenType CFF anyway, so Adobe took it as also being an opportunity to clean up the cruft in the OpenType CFF format. CFF2 removes some things from CFF that are also in the main table-based part of OpenType, outside the CFF/CFF2 table.

    I think this was a great idea… in principle. But the lack of backwards compatibility for non-variable CFF2 fonts, plus the fact that CFF2 was not ready nearly as fast as the variable font extensions to TTF (I assume at least partly because of these optimizations), has meant that variable fonts other than Adobe’s are nearly all TTF based at this point, and pretty nearly nobody is creating non-variable fonts in OpenType CFF2 format.

    (I am curious as to whether even Adobe is issuing fonts routinely in this format.)
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    Following some smart remarks by Igor Freiberger on the Fontlab forum (post "Glyph set / Coverage"), I modified my original spreadsheet.
    I join the new version and hope it will help somebody. 
  • Claudio Piccinini
    Claudio Piccinini Posts: 681
    Thomas Phinney said:
    Glyph names are a (near?) universal convenience in font editors, and required in OpenType CFF (1) fonts, but optional for OpenType TTF/CFF2 fonts.
    Thanks Thomas! But aren’t these "friendly names" for glyphs occasionally equivocal. I see that a glyph in some cases is called in two different ways (in Fontlab in one way, in other editors? — then there are Internet databases).
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    Claudio Piccinini said:
    But aren’t these "friendly names" for glyphs occasionally equivocal. I see that a glyph in some cases is called in two different ways (in Fontlab in one way, in other editors? — then there are Internet databases).
    Hello Claudio,
    It seems "two different ways" is an optimistic view. I should say "many different ways". 
    This is why I mentioned the "usual names"(?) and the ones in Fontlab. 
  • Mark Simonson
    Mark Simonson Posts: 1,739
    edited May 2021
    There are standard names that should be used in final fonts, which are found here: https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-aglfn

    A lot of the standard names are cryptic and give you no clue as to what they represent (e.g., "afii10032" is the cyrillic "O") and are hard to remember. Glyphs' "friendly names" substitutes readable names for the convenience of the type designer. These are changed to standard names when a font is generated.

    Other font editors use the standard names, or allow you to make up your own as long as they are changed to standard names somehow in the final fonts. I know I did something like this when I used RoboFont, but don't remember the details.
  • Yves Michel
    Yves Michel Posts: 183
    Thank you Mark for this useful list!
  • Claudio Piccinini
    Claudio Piccinini Posts: 681
    Mark Simonson said:
    There are standard names that should be used in final fonts, which are found here: https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/agl-aglfn

    A lot of the standard names are cryptic and give you no clue as to what they represent (e.g., "afii10032" is the cyrillic "O") and are hard to remember. Glyphs' "friendly names" substitutes readable names for the convenience of the type designer. These are changed to standard names when a font is generated.

    Other font editors use the standard names, or allow you to make up your own as long as they are changed to standard names somehow in the final fonts. I know I did something like this when I used RoboFont, but don't remember the details.
    Thanks Mark. It seems Fontlab does the same, indeed. Here’s some glyphs after generation, which had "friendly names" within the VFC file.

    «Not all arrows are created equal», the evil one said. :D



  • Florian Pircher
    Florian Pircher Posts: 176
    edited May 2021
    Glyphs has nice names for most maths operators/arrows, but they can get unwieldy :‌)

    May I present, circleDividedByHorizontalBarAndTopHalfDividedByVerticalBar, downHarpoonWithBarbLeftBesideDownHarpoonWithBarbRight, and rightTwoHeadedArrowWithTailWithDoubleVerticalStroke:


  • Laurensius Adi
    Laurensius Adi Posts: 45
    @Florian Pircher I genuinely thought you're joking until I googled it. I found it here https://www.textcompare.org/unicodes/miscellaneous-mathematical-symbols-b/. Wow.

  • Dave Crossland
    Dave Crossland Posts: 1,431
    Don't forget the LettError/glyphNameFormatter: Generate list of glyphnames from unicode names.

     https://github.com/LettError/glyphNameFormatter

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