Proofing techniques: making sure your glyphs are correctly encoded

Saga Söderback
Saga Söderback Posts: 42
in Type Design Software
Hi all –

I was wondering if anyone had come up with a particularly clever way of checking to see if your glyphs are correctly encoded. Folks like me who occasionally have to perform some brain surgery on fonts with MANY glyphs might slip up and mis-encode a glyph in a script they can't read. Has anyone come up with a useful technique to double-check that the glyph you have encoded as 0x52E5 actually is 0x52E5? Currently, I am pasting a good known source into the mask of my font and then going through one at a time, so it certainly would be amazing if there was a way to do so automagically...
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  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 2,013
    Dump your font to text in Indesign. Copy/paste to a second column and use a font that you know works for the second.

    It gets a lot harder for writing systems that require many unencoded glyphs. I still haven't figured that one out.
  • Bahman Eslami
    Bahman Eslami Posts: 73
    There is a free software available in OSX called unicodeChecker. It helps to find out what is shape of the character (if a font installed on system contains that character) and also some extra information.
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 2,013
    That reminds me—DTL OTMaster is great for this. Open your font, a known good font (Brill Roman), and then fire up the side-by-side viewer.

  • Saga Söderback
    Saga Söderback Posts: 42
    Bahman Eslami said:
    There is a free software available in OSX called unicodeChecker. It helps to find out what is shape of the character (if a font installed on system contains that character) and also some extra information.
    Indeed, UnicodeChecker is an essential part of the toolkit.

    James Puckett said:
    That reminds me—DTL OTMaster is great for this. Open your font, a known good font (Brill Roman), and then fire up the side-by-side viewer.
    I only have the freebie OTMaster, but it's still a good pick for this. Is the software worth buying? It doesn't look like it'd save my butt too much, but maybe I've just gotten lucky so far.

    Thanks for the tips!
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 2,013
    I only have the freebie OTMaster, but it's still a good pick for this. Is the software worth buying?

    The free version has helped me enough time that I went ahead and bought the full version. I don’t do production with OTMaster, but it’s great for poking around in OT tables so I can find out if a problem is in a compiled font or a software bug.

  • Christoph Koeberlin
    Christoph Koeberlin Posts: 51
    Maybe try Autopsy?

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