TTF font encoding and VOLT

[siggy]

I am trying to use TTF fonts made in Fontographer 4.7.5 to make OpenType fonts with VOLT. The resulting fonts work for the most part (lots of contextual alternates), but what does not work are accented characters. I am using complete glyphs (ex.: an 'a' with the accent already over it) instead of separately combining a base glyph with a mark. The accents can be typed fine from the plain TTF file, but after processing it through VOLT, the accented letters are no longer in the same position within the font, and cannot be typed.

Question: what encoding do I need to use in creating the TTF file that will preserve the position of the accented characters?  or is this not possible from Fontographer?

Thanks!

[tiro_hudson]

Open the Glyph Edit window in VOLT. This will show you the full glyph set of the font, plus the Unicode encodings for the individual glyphs. You should check that the accented letters have the correct Unicode values.

VOLT will rewrite the font's cmap (encoding) table, so it is important to make sure that the encodings in the Glyph Edit window are correct. When you first open a font in VOLT, the encodings found in the font are automatically imported, but perhaps if the Fontographer generated encodings are not what VOLT is expecting there may be a problem.

[Sergey Malkin (Microsoft)]

Yes, VOLT may not be that smart in handling cmap table. It was included to cover most of the work on converting old fonts into Unicode. These days, many designers prefer to deal with character encodings outside of VOLT, so I added special flag for VOLT to not compile cmap table.

When you open your font in VOLT first time, go to Tools\Options dialog and check "Do not overwrite cmap table" checkbox. It will be stored in the project and you will not worry about VOLT messing up your cmap again.

Thanks,
Sergey

[siggy]

Awesome! (yeah, grew up in the 80's)  Thanks for the tips, both of you!

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