Some glyphs (made with FontForge) aren't showing in Adobe Illustrator

Marco Pezzotta

Hi everybody,

I'm writing here because after trying everything found on the web I still can't solve a problem.

I'm testing in Adobe Illustrator a new typeface I'm designing with FontForge.

The problem is that a few glyphs aren't showing, if I click on the "Glyphs" panel they are missing.
Another strange thing is that for different weights, different glyphs aren't showing.

Examples:



When installing the .otf everything looks ok:




And when I type those letters I get nothing, like shown here:



I exported with these settings:



After many tests I found that when I generate fonts with these options (Hints + Flex Hints) the problem doesn't exist (but I don't want them, then the text doesn't look good):



Things I already tried:
- Deleting and reinstalling the fonts
- Rebooting
- Delete Windows Font Cache
- Delete all "adobefnt.lst" files

No matter what, if I export without hints I always get the missing glyphs problem in Adobe Illustrator.
However, in WordPad and GIMP there aren't problems.

I'm a few years into type design, but doing it just in my free time I can't progress rapidly so maybe that's a noob question! Having searched on TypeDrawers history I haven't found the solution.
Just an apparently similar problem with an alternate, but it was about the "aalt feature".

Do any of you have any idea what the problem might be?

Thank you

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

Have you checked the results of Element ➛ Validation ➛ Validate... from FontForge menu?

I think you can also try Reencode first (in FF menu Encoding ➛ Reencode ➛ 10646-1 (UNICODE, BMP) )

Marco Pezzotta

Have you checked the results of Element ➛ Validation ➛ Validate... from FontForge menu?

I got this message: "This font contains non-integral coordinates. That's OK in PostScript and SVG but causes problems in TrueType."

And a few "Missing Points at Extrema", but not for the glyphs involved in the problem

I think you can also try Reencode first (in FF menu Encoding ➛ Reencode ➛ 10646-1 (UNICODE, BMP) )

It already had a check mark on it, I tried again but didn't work.

James Hultquist-Todd

I don’t know that software, but when you type the missing characters in Illustrator, is the width the same as what it should be in your font? Did you draw the E in a background layer that didn’t export?

Dave Crossland

Wrong layers seems likely to me!

Marco Pezzotta

@James Hultquist-Todd @Dave Crossland

I checked the layers and nothing seems wrong to me, all the glyphs are designed in "Fore":

(E is not working, F yes)

but when you type the missing characters in Illustrator, is the width the same as what it should be in your font?

It adds a very tiny space (less than 5% of the width of the letter, measured with ruler on screen), but just the first time.

Let's say that I type "WEEEEE", it appears as "W", not "W         ".
And I must click backspace 6 times to delete the W, so the 5 Es are counted but not showing.

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

it's unlikely, but a few years ago I had a case in FF with two glyphs with the same unicode number. Your description might fit this. This means that in the font, apart from the glyph "E" with unicode U+0045, you have an empty glyph somewhere with the same unicode number (with a small width)

Thomas Phinney

OpenType does not allow two glyphs with the same codepoint in a single cmap subtable. So if FontForge DOES allow it (which I would say is a bug), I suppose one of the two glyphs has to “win” at export time.

Grzegorz Luk (gluk)

Thomas Phinney said:

... So if FontForge DOES allow it (which I would say is a bug)...

Yes, it was a bug once in my life (if I remember correctly related to the saved file after FF crash). Today when I tried to assign an existing unicode number to a glyph in the editor, Fontforge warned about it and prevented it from happening. But .sfd projects are plain text files and I managed to recreate this situation in a text editor.