How to truncate and merge glyphs

[ben]

Hi,
I've bought Type 3.2 a week ago and find it very useful. I am particularly interested in learning the action commands. But I don't seem to find a way to clear or select a specified area of the glyph.
I'm working on chinese fonts with hanyu pinyin phonetics placed under the chinese characters (please refer to the attached file1). I intend to clear all the chinese characters leaving only the phonetics for each glyph so that I can merge it to other design of chinese characters.
Of course, I can do it manually by selecting the characters and deleting them with the delete key followed by pasting the new chinese characters one by one. But there will be more than 32,000 glyphs to go!
Do you have any suggestion on how to generate file3 using file1 and file2?

Attachments:

[Allan Murray]

There is currently no Action command that will do what you require.

Type 3.2 is, however, due to be updated in the next few days with an unrelated feature.
I will add a suitable Action command(s) along with this update - as it seems like a useful addition, and is simple to implement.

I will post instructions here - so watch this space.

[ben]

Wow, that would be great!
We'll be looking forward to the new update! Thanks a lot.

[ben]

By the way, just in case it's simple to implement, I suggest that a function be added, something like "transfer and merge map", in the list of options for transferring glyphs from an external font.
It's just to give a choice to merge a mapped glyph with a glyph from the external font mapped to the same unicode character.

[ben]

And also, I noticed that the maximum glyph range under the Global Run Action menu could only be up to 32767. Is it possible to increase this limit so that I could cover all the glyphs of CJK Unified Ideographs (20992 glyphs) + Private use area (6400 glyphs) + CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A (6592 glyphs) which is a total of at least 33984 glyphs?

[Allan Murray]

Two additional action commands have been added to version 3.2.009 (re-download using the link sent with your registration details).

selectregion x1 y1 x2 y2 will select points in a rectangular region where (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) are opposite corners
copyselect will copy the selected points to the clipboard

(you can also use the sequence:
use select
clear
to delete the selected points).

I used the following script on your first font to extract the phonetics:
selectregion 0 -300 1030 -750
copyselect
use all
clear
paste

Then used the new transfer and merge function to attach the phonetics to the second font.

p.s. The maximum glyph range has also been fixed (this was a bug).