Glyph Locations

[ThornyJohn]

This could very well be because I'm a total noob when it comes to font creation software, so please bear with me here...

---- Background ----
I created a small dingbat font using Corel Draw's export to TTF feature. The font worked in many (but not all needed) cases, and when looked at in a font manager (Nexusfont) everything was there where it was supposed to be (for example, there is a globe icon as the lowercase "w," location DEC:119 HEX:0077). However, some programs would not read the font because Corel's export to TTF is very basic and lacks the ability to assign some kind of unicode table...something or other...(there's my noobishness showing).

Enter Type Light. I loaded up the ttf font and saved it using Type Light and voila! The software that could not see my font previously suddenly can. Yay! However...

---- The Issue (?) ----
Everything seems to work okay, but when I load up the newly saved font into my font manager, the sample font only shows regular sans-serif characters, not my dingbats. I have to open up the character map and go looking up into the clouds to find my dingbats (that globe icon that was replacing the lowercase "w" in location DEC:119 HEX:0077 can now be found at location DEC:61559 HEX:F077). If I open up a file that contains the font in question using Microsoft Word, Corel Draw, Inkscape, Gimp, or InDesign, the font shows up correctly (meaning I see the dingbats and not the regular letters), so I guess there's some kind of substitution going on?

My main concern is that I can no longer see the dingbats in the lower 255 when using my font manager, like I could with the original font made with Corel Draw's export to TTF. I eventually want to use this font as a web font, so I'm a little concerned that the newer version from Type Light, using the sunstitution, will work okay in that environment. I just want to make sure that I didn't do something wrong or miss a step that would also keep the glyphs in their original locations?

Help.

[Allan Murray]

Sounds like it is a symbol font which might not have be setup correctly (symbol fonts have characters mapped to the F020 to F0FF range, and can often cause issues). Try selecting the symbol character set codepage in the mapping window and make sure "active" is checked before saving. If this does not work, you can send it to me ([e-mail]) and I will have a look at it.

[ThornyJohn]

Thanks for the reply. I could not find an area called "symbol character set" in the range you listed (private use area). However, my glyphs are there (as you noted) taking up many of the spots between F021 and F07C. I did select that range (E000 Private Use Area) and checked active before saving, but the result is the same. I'll forward the font file and another sample dingbat font file that works as expected for reference.

[Allan Murray]

The forwarded font file was fixed by doing this:

Open in Type 3.2
Select the unicode script 0000 Basic Latin in the mapping window
Uncheck active
Save font

Symbol fonts (characters mapped to F020 to F0FF range) are very sensitive to the mapping settings.
A Symbol font should have only these two scripts/codepages active:
unicode script - E000 Private Use Area
codepage - Symbol Character Set

This normally will happen automatically when a symbol font is detected, but on some occassions not.