Strange behaviour accents, placing above ascender guide and question on font cache

#1

I am designing my first font with Fontself Maker and can’t solve three things:

  1. I designed accents like the acute accent that you can use on an e: “é”. If I type the accent without an “e” (just alt-e and a space), it displays it perfectly. If I type alt-e, it first displays the accent and when I then type the “e”, the “e” appears at the same place, while at the same time the accent disappears. How does the placement work of the separate accents you can design, for example the “acute accent”, and can this behaviour be explained?

  2. I see in the template you are providing that you even place elements (partly) above the ascender guide line. However, if I do so, and export the font and install it. Programs like Microsoft Office Word, chop off everything above the ascender guide line. The Adobe software doesn’t do that, but of course I would like to use the font in a more generic way.

  3. I noticed that the font cache of my mac is very stubborn. Even a reboot of my machine will not take care of loading the newest version of my font. After a lot of throwing away, reload, etc etc. I managed to load the latest version, but there must be an easier way. If I google for a solution, only very low level terminal root user solutions are provided where you remove fontd System or User databases along with any cache
    files. Can you advice how to clear the font cache in a save way?

I work an a Mac (High Sierra) with Adobe Illustrator CC 2018.

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#2

Hi Monique,

  1. Not sure about your exact problem (would need the font to understand the problem) but accent behaviors depend on host app settings (see https://help.fontself.com/troubleshooting/missing-characters-font-substitution).

Ideally, you would create the base characters, their accented versions, as well as the accents themselves- so that even if substitution happens when you start typing the accent, the font is not switched to the default.

  1. The chopping occurs when some letters are way above the overall bounding box (which is a hidden property at this stage). Just use the Scale minus button in the middle of the screen to scale down all your characters. They will be smaller compared to other fonts at the same size, but will fit in for apps like Word.

  2. As for the caching, it’s usually best to close all apps before updating a font, but should you get into any trouble, have a look at FontNuke (great tool for clearing many font caches https://www.jamapi.com/products/fontnuke/) or go the command line way if it’s not working in High Sierra (haven’t tested this OS yet): https://gist.github.com/jaredhowland/2da83f0cc0fbb1ac523f

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#3

Hi Monique,

  1. The only way to create characters with accents is to design them completely, means character plus accent together as a new character.

  2. I don’t have any clue about Microsoft Office.
    Did you work with rulers? Did you select them together with your character at importing them to fontself maker?

  3. The easiest way to erase the font cache ist to start the Mac and to hit (and hold) the shift key after the start sound comes up.
    There are tools that can do this for you. But you have to restart your computer after proceeding as well. One of this tools is “ONYX”.
    You can find here: https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

Please ensure to load the right version for your system version!

Friendly Greetz
Hybi

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