Multiple Unicodes assigned to single letter

#1

Hello guys. Been thoroughly enjoying the Smart Kerning/Spacing function - so I used it on an old font i had to rework. Dropped the outlines and pretty much finished a typeface in less than 2 days. But I wanted to add some diacritics so I switched to FontLab 7 - for its easiness of creating diacritics and for the FontAudit function - as my outlines were far from perfect. Added all the necessary diacritics just to realize that they’re not usable in Adobe CC 2021 products - and they were there, in the Glyphs panel. What seemed to be the issue - they had no Unicodes assigned to them?!?! (See the attachment)

By default FontSelf assigns a range of Unicodes to single characters that are part of diacritics - a, u, o, e, y, i. When FontLab creates the diacritics it cannot assign them the correct Unicode because it has already been assigned to the main glyph. So I needed to manually remove all Unicodes from main elements and add them to the diacritic glyphs.

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Screenshot (5).png1920×1080 163 KB

Is there a particular reason for this behavior of FontSelf?

Thanks for the response!!!

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#2

This is an automated fallback solution for fonts that don’t support accented characters. We assumed that in most cases end users would prefer to see the unaccented glyph than a different default font (and not something you can deactivate for now).

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#3

Thanks, Franz. I supposed something similar. Hopefully you guys are working on future improvements like easy diacritics creation :smiley: so we can stay away from Fontlab entirely!!!

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#4

I have the same issue. I understand the reasoning by Franz, but this approach is a big hinder to me. This forces me to create the diacritics manually outside Fontself and/or FontForge. It might be a good idea for color fonts, where we be happy with just an A-Z range. But I really think the workflow should be considered where we add the basic latin character set + a series of accents and that the diacritics can be added in a third app. Or that Fontself could maybe generate a series of accented characters in the artboard.

At the same time, I also understand (and appreciate a lot) that Fontself does not have a series of complex settings.