Many characters do not show up after installing font

[Marie]

I’ve been working on my very first font for the past days and today I was ready to install and test it.
Turns out most of the characters apart from the basic Latin set do NOT show up when I use the font (in Ilustrator, Photoshop etc.)
I created a ton of diacritics (Ä,Ö,Ü, ß, œ, ž, …) as well as symbols like ?=@& etc. I even have alternates for some characters!
I made the letters in Illustrator, dragged them into FS and for the diactritics used copy & paste to name them (copied the characters from a website that provides all kids of character sets).

When I type inside of the FS panel, everything looks fine. But with the installed font most of my character set is NOT there. For example ß does not exist at all and is replaced with another font, Ä shows up as A. Also in the glyphs panel of Illustrator these characters do not show up at all. Super frustrating

What did I do wrong?

[Marie]

Adding a screenshot of what the font looks like when used in Illustrator:

[urs7000]

Hello Marie and welcome to the forum.

Without having the AI file, I can’t see any error based on the screenshots. If you like, you can send it to me: info @ cg4u.de (without spaces).

My tips are:

• Check that you have not installed your character set locally in Illustrator in between or by mistake. The path to the folder is: /Users//Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts/Fontself
• I already assign names to my glyphs in Window > Layers, then I don’t have to do it later in FS. If I use an OFL font as the basis for my font, I transform the letters into paths with my Javascript and the names of the letters are retained. This saves copying and pasting diacritical symbols.
  Links for European special characters:
• https://www.computergrafik-know-how.de/europaeische-sonderzeichen/ (German)
• http://www.computergrafik-know-how.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/A048-FD-European_Special_Characters_opt.pdf (English)
  Links for some of my javascripts:
• https://www.behance.net/gallery/123822365/Javascript-for-Illustrator-Font-Outline-with-Names
• https://www.behance.net/gallery/124007461/Javascript-for-Illustrator-Rename-Abc2Unicode
• https://www.behance.net/gallery/132742865/Javascript-for-Illustrator-Find-objects-by-name
• https://www.behance.net/gallery/127731937/Javascript-for-Illustrator-RenamePlusjsx

Best regards,
– j.

[urs7000]

Update: I forgot:

1. in my experience, Apple Fontbook should be closed and restarted after every action (installation, uninstallation). Try to uninstall/delete the new font, Close Fontbook, Restart Fontbook and install the new font again.
2. if problems occur, restarting the Mac can help. Try also restart with PRAM-Start, see https://www.macworld.com/article/224955/how-to-reset-a-macs-nvram-pram-and-smc.html
3. There are several font chances under macOS. These can also be deleted specifically, for example with https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html.

– j.

[Marie]

Hallo Jens, danke für deine ausführliche Hilfestellung - thanks a bunch!
I looked at all your tips today and obviously it was the “restarting the Mac” part that solved the problem for me. It didn’t occur to me this could help but today all glphys are displayed when I type them.

Also I find your links very interesting and helpful as well as the description of your own design process (assigning glyphs names the the layers.). I will look deeper into the overall design process of fontself for future fonts I make!