Names and shapes don't correspond

[cunliffethompson]

I began to use VOLT a year ago but postponed further work until now.
During that time I continued to develop my True Type font.   Now to my
dismay (!) I load the current font and the old project file and find the tables
in the Glyph Groups window are corrupted.  My font is a Hebrew font but
so everyone will understand the problem, I'll describe it as if the
glyphs were A, B, C...

Shape      Name
(blank)     A
A              B
B              C

All the shapes have moved down by one row.
Any ideas on what caused this and how to fix it?
Thanks Mike

[tiro_hudson]

What has happened is that the glyph order has been changed and a new glyph has been inserted somewhere before the glyphs that were there when you started work on your VOLT project. Don't worry, this is quite easy to fix. What you need to do is create a fresh source combining the glyph data for the new font with the lookup, glyph group etc. data from the old project.

Presuming that the glyph names used in your lookups are correct for the behaviour you want, make sure that you have exported a VOLT project file (.vtp). Then follow these steps:

Step 1 : Generate a fresh source font from your font design tool (FontLab, FontForge, or whatever). This font will presumably have correct glyph names and encodings.

Step 2 : Open this new source font in VOLT and import the postscript glyph names via the Import/Glyph Data function.

Step 3 : Import the exported .vtp project file from your previous VOLT work being sure to select the option to 'Skip glyph definitions'. What this will do is merge your old lookups, glyph groups etc. into the new source file but without overwriting the new glyph data.

Step 4 : Save, and continue work.

[tiro_hudson]

Note: I'm assuming that the current release version of VOLT contains the 'Skip glyph definitions' option for importing .vtp files. If not, this must be a new feature in beta that Sergey was kind enough to give me, and will be in the next release version.

If this option is not available to you at this time, you can easily merge the old lookups etc. with the new glyph data by exporting the new glyph data from the fresh source and copy/paste/replace the old glyph data at the beginning of the old .vtp file. You can do this in a text editor. [Note that if you are on Windows, you will probably need to convert the encoding of the .vtp file from Mac/UNIX to DOS before copying and pasting, because VOLT exports text files with weird line-endings. I use the brilliant UltraEdit text editor, which has a conversion function to do this (the autoconversion does not work, however).] If editing the .vtp manually, remember not to include the END termination when copying the new glyph data; there should be only one END termination in the .vtp, at the very end of the file.

[cunliffethompson]

Thanks John, I think I understand what you are suggesting and I jumped into it

If I open my TTF font in VOLT and then export the GLYPH_DEF part, it looks like this:

DEF_GLYPH "glyph0" ID 0 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph1" ID 1 UNICODE 0 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph2" ID 2 UNICODE 13 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph3" ID 3 UNICODE 32 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
etc
DEF_GLYPH "glyph274" ID 274 UNICODE 64332 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph275" ID 275 UNICODE 64333 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph276" ID 276 UNICODE 64334 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph277" ID 277 UNICODE 64335 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH END

However the same code in my project file looks quite different:
DEF_GLYPH "glyph0" ID 0 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "uni0000" ID 1 UNICODE 0 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "CR" ID 2 UNICODE 13 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "space" ID 3 UNICODEVALUES "U+0020,U+00A0" TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "exclam" ID 4 UNICODE 33 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
etc
DEF_GLYPH "uniFB4D" ID 274 UNICODE 64333 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "uniFB4E" ID 275 UNICODE 64334 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "aleflamed" ID 276 UNICODE 64335 TYPE LIGATURE COMPONENTS 2 END_GLYPH
DEF_GLYPH "glyph277" ID 277 TYPE BASE END_GLYPH

If I replace the section,  I'm going to loose all the names such as "CR", "space" and "aleflamed".
Actually I would like to put a lot more names into my TTF file so I can read "zakefqatan" instead in VOLT of something like uni0594.
Could you suggest what I should try next?
Mike

[cunliffethompson]

I have discovered that the problem was caused by my adding a no-break hyphen to the font.  Should I care about nobreak?

Assuming I do, I will need to export the Glyph Data, but as you can see from the previous post, the names of the glyphs such as "aleflamed" are not being exported.
Can you see what I'm doing wrong?
Mike

[tiro_hudson]

This document may be of help to you:

http://www.tiro.com/John/FontLab-to-VOLTworkflow.pdf

It explains a FontLab-to-VOLT workflow including management of glyph names. The same basic process will work with other font development tools, e.g. FontForge-to-VOLT. The assumption is the postscript glyph names are assigned in the first tool, and then read by VOLT. Note that VOLT itself does not write any names to the font: the glyph names used in VOLT are used only internally in that program, so it is possible to have names in VOLT that differ from the postscript glyph names in the font.

[cunliffethompson]

Thanks John for the various pointers.
I studied the VTP source code and then edited it directly. Works!
The free HTML editor "Coffee Cup" works well for this purpose.
Mike

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