Problem with font

bobcdy · 09-07-2011, 06:07 PM

I've been developing a font based on Garamond, using FontCreator. All works fine with Adobe DE with on my glyphs and including some ligatures but those ligatures assigned to the 'private use area' in unicode values do not show properly. There are no standard unicode values for these ligatures as far as I know.

Does anyone have any idea what to do about these problem ligatures?
Bob

(I was going to attach a copy of the file, but it was not accepted by MR)

pholy · 09-07-2011, 08:01 PM

Yes, Unicode 6.0 only has 7 Latin ligatures - ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ft, and st. So I guess any others would have to go to a private area.

One would hope that ADE and the RM implementations would be smart enough to check the current font for glyphs, but maybe they hard coded some range checks instead. Have you tried the Firefox epub extension or any webKit implementations?

You could zip your file - that should be accepted.

bobcdy · 09-07-2011, 09:26 PM

Pholy,
It's very odd - some time ago I thought I had solved the ligature problem with one of my font versions. All the ligatures worked with both the older ADE and the new preview version. Now a few days later I find that my new font does not show the private use glyphs with either ADE version, AND, my older font now does the same thing. What has happened? I even tried a commercial version of a similar font by Adobe with ligatures and found the same problems. Apparently something has changed in my computer or with ADE in the short time between working and not working but I have no idea what it is. I certainly think I done everything correctly with the unicode assignments and other font features, but perhaps not.

I've attached the new font as zip, as suggested. Perhaps it works with other computers(?)

Jellby · 09-08-2011, 03:35 AM

In order to have the ligatures working you need:

1. A font with properly defined ligatures. The glyphs must be somewhere, those with Unicode slots, can be placed there, other ligatures should be in a private area. Then there must be some setting that tells when to use the ligature, I don't know about FontCreator, but for FontForge see here.

2. A program that can actually use the ligatures defined in the fonts. I seems the ADE 1.8 preview can, and previous versions cannot. If you want to test the font, look for a program (web browser, text editor...) that uses ligatures in other fonts, and then try your font there.

DSpider · 09-08-2011, 04:26 AM

Or you could place them as symbols within free Unicode slots and use the Character Map to copy-paste them manually or batch replace fi, fl, ft, etc with just one of these so called "symbols". Chances are they'll show up in any ADE version as long as it uses the font. One possible issue could be text-to-speech but I don't think they're advanced enough (yet).

Jellby · 09-08-2011, 05:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DSpider

Or you could place them as symbols within free Unicode slots and use the Character Map to copy-paste them manually or batch replace fi, fl, ft, etc with just one of these so called "symbols".

If you have any intention of distributing the book, please don't do that. It won't work with other fonts, it won't work with text searching, it won't work with hyphenation...

bobcdy · 09-08-2011, 05:51 PM

An update with my private use area glyphs in ADE: I've tried everything I can think of to make them show in ADE, and found only that they show as ? in ADE, and as glyphs in preview ADE but the characters are incorrect - for my pua glyphs in preview ADE they show a either the AE lig. or as the capital A with various diacritic marks (??) Thus there is a bug of some sort somewhere that confuses the unicode assignment of the pua glyphs (but I'm sure that the glyphs are properly assigned to correct pua values such as E000, E001, etc.) As an experiment I reassigned one glyph to a far-out pua value U+F000 that the preview ADE showed that as a box with an x through it.

I'm adding this last to my observations some time after I wrote the above: I found the problem, I think, but I have no way to solve it. I tried the font on another computer - a quad core 3gh win7 system, and had no problem with the pua glyphs without resorting to the preview ADE. Consequently the fault resides in my system itself. I'll try a Win XP restore to see if that helps my problem.

This last is being written in the early morning of the day after I wrote the above paragraph. After I did a disk image save for my C drive, I replaced it with one created 10 days ago. This still didn't solve the problem. But when I deleted ADE, preview ADE, and Sigil, rebooted and reinstalled new downloads, all worked fine. I can see the pua glyphs with ADE, and they even show correctly in Book View of Sigil v. 0.4.2!

Bob

Jellby · 09-09-2011, 04:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobcdy

for my pua glyphs in preview ADE they show a either the AE lig. or as the capital A with various diacritic marks (??)

That looks like an encoding problem, since you are using non-ASCII characters, the encoding makes a difference. Make sure you are using utf-8 and that it's properly declared.

If you want to test with a font that does have ligatures (though subtle), try this. You can also try with this test epub.

bobcdy · 09-10-2011, 12:12 AM

Jellby,
Thanks for the link to your test epub. My system now shows all the ligatures it should (at least I think so)

I had a question about the v2 text epub; I tried to open it with Sigil 0.4.2 and could open the very first page only even though all the pages including the toc were visible with ADE. Why can't I open it with Sigil?

DSpider · 09-10-2011, 03:24 AM

DRM perhaps?

bobcdy · 09-10-2011, 04:30 PM

No, I least I think not because I was able to unzip and examine the files. While not very familiar with drm'd files, I don't believe one can unzip them (?)

Jellby · 09-11-2011, 04:37 AM

It's probably the "Entities" test. Flightcrew doesn't like it, although as far as I know it is spec-compliant.

DaleDe · 09-21-2011, 12:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bobcdy

No, I least I think not because I was able to unzip and examine the files. While not very familiar with drm'd files, I don't believe one can unzip them (?)

ePub DRM can generally be unzipped. The DRM is applied to the internal files themselves, not to the package. DRM can be applied separately to embedded fonts.

Dale

09-07-2011, 06:07 PM	#1
bobcdy Fanatic Posts: 527 Karma: 1048576 Join Date: May 2009 Device: bebook; prs-950; nook simple touch; HTC Jetstream tablet	Problem with font I've been developing a font based on Garamond, using FontCreator. All works fine with Adobe DE with on my glyphs and including some ligatures but those ligatures assigned to the 'private use area' in unicode values do not show properly. There are no standard unicode values for these ligatures as far as I know. Does anyone have any idea what to do about these problem ligatures? Bob (I was going to attach a copy of the file, but it was not accepted by MR)

09-08-2011, 05:51 PM	#7
bobcdy Fanatic Posts: 527 Karma: 1048576 Join Date: May 2009 Device: bebook; prs-950; nook simple touch; HTC Jetstream tablet	An update with my private use area glyphs in ADE: I've tried everything I can think of to make them show in ADE, and found only that they show as ? in ADE, and as glyphs in preview ADE but the characters are incorrect - for my pua glyphs in preview ADE they show a either the AE lig. or as the capital A with various diacritic marks (??) Thus there is a bug of some sort somewhere that confuses the unicode assignment of the pua glyphs (but I'm sure that the glyphs are properly assigned to correct pua values such as E000, E001, etc.) As an experiment I reassigned one glyph to a far-out pua value U+F000 that the preview ADE showed that as a box with an x through it. I'm adding this last to my observations some time after I wrote the above: I found the problem, I think, but I have no way to solve it. I tried the font on another computer - a quad core 3gh win7 system, and had no problem with the pua glyphs without resorting to the preview ADE. Consequently the fault resides in my system itself. I'll try a Win XP restore to see if that helps my problem. This last is being written in the early morning of the day after I wrote the above paragraph. After I did a disk image save for my C drive, I replaced it with one created 10 days ago. This still didn't solve the problem. But when I deleted ADE, preview ADE, and Sigil, rebooted and reinstalled new downloads, all worked fine. I can see the pua glyphs with ADE, and they even show correctly in Book View of Sigil v. 0.4.2! Bob Last edited by bobcdy; 09-10-2011 at 04:15 PM.

09-10-2011, 12:12 AM	#9
bobcdy Fanatic Posts: 527 Karma: 1048576 Join Date: May 2009 Device: bebook; prs-950; nook simple touch; HTC Jetstream tablet	Jellby, Thanks for the link to your test epub. My system now shows all the ligatures it should (at least I think so) I had a question about the v2 text epub; I tried to open it with Sigil 0.4.2 and could open the very first page only even though all the pages including the toc were visible with ADE. Why can't I open it with Sigil? Last edited by bobcdy; 09-10-2011 at 04:16 PM.

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09-07-2011, 08:01 PM	#2
pholy Booklegger Posts: 1,801 Karma: 7999816 Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada Device: BeBook(1 & 2010), PEZ, PRS-505, Kobo BT, PRS-T1, Playbook, Kobo Touch	Yes, Unicode 6.0 only has 7 Latin ligatures - ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, ft, and st. So I guess any others would have to go to a private area. One would hope that ADE and the RM implementations would be smart enough to check the current font for glyphs, but maybe they hard coded some range checks instead. Have you tried the Firefox epub extension or any webKit implementations? You could zip your file - that should be accepted.

09-08-2011, 03:35 AM	#4
Jellby frumious Bandersnatch Posts: 7,516 Karma: 18512745 Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Spaniard in Sweden Device: Cybook Orizon, Kobo Aura	In order to have the ligatures working you need: 1. A font with properly defined ligatures. The glyphs must be somewhere, those with Unicode slots, can be placed there, other ligatures should be in a private area. Then there must be some setting that tells when to use the ligature, I don't know about FontCreator, but for FontForge see here. 2. A program that can actually use the ligatures defined in the fonts. I seems the ADE 1.8 preview can, and previous versions cannot. If you want to test the font, look for a program (web browser, text editor...) that uses ligatures in other fonts, and then try your font there.

09-08-2011, 04:26 AM	#5
DSpider Evangelist Posts: 450 Karma: 343115 Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Romania Device: PW2 2014	Or you could place them as symbols within free Unicode slots and use the Character Map to copy-paste them manually or batch replace fi, fl, ft, etc with just one of these so called "symbols". Chances are they'll show up in any ADE version as long as it uses the font. One possible issue could be text-to-speech but I don't think they're advanced enough (yet).

09-10-2011, 03:24 AM	#10
DSpider Evangelist Posts: 450 Karma: 343115 Join Date: Nov 2009 Location: Romania Device: PW2 2014	DRM perhaps?

09-10-2011, 04:30 PM	#11
bobcdy Fanatic Posts: 527 Karma: 1048576 Join Date: May 2009 Device: bebook; prs-950; nook simple touch; HTC Jetstream tablet	No, I least I think not because I was able to unzip and examine the files. While not very familiar with drm'd files, I don't believe one can unzip them (?)

09-11-2011, 04:37 AM	#12
Jellby frumious Bandersnatch Posts: 7,516 Karma: 18512745 Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Spaniard in Sweden Device: Cybook Orizon, Kobo Aura	It's probably the "Entities" test. Flightcrew doesn't like it, although as far as I know it is spec-compliant.

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