Exclamation point moved to null position

Last week I discovered that some of the Mac-Windows TrueType fonts I had generated had a missing exclamation point. It was missing only in the Mac-Windows True Type version, not in the OpenType PS versions or in the Mac TrueType or PostScript versions. I opened the generated font and found that the exclamation point was in the null position. It had the glyph name exclam, the unicode name Null and the unicode number 0000. The spot where the exclamation point should have been was named _33 and had no unicode number or name.

Poking around, I found that this happened only if the first 32 characters were completely empty in the Fontographer file. If they were not, sometimes one of the characters that was in one of these spaces was moved to the null position, and I think it was always the first one. I think I had emptied these slots by encoding the file to OpenType Standard or OpenType Pro.

The problem does not occur if I open up the carriage return character (14th box) and resize it. By doing that, there is something in this box and that seems to prevent the move of the exclamation point.

I am using Fontographer for Macintosh on OS X 10.5.8.

R Schenk