Hi,
I recently tried to create an Arabic font. The trouble is that while the letters display and connect correctly in the Edit tab, if I export the font to OTF and open it in a word processor, the letters fail to connect and display as if I had LTR selected in the Edit tab. Is there a setting I’m missing somewhere?
Perhaps click the refresh button (circled arrow) in File > Font Info > Features and export again.
How do you install your font? This may be the result of a cache conflict. Use the Adobe fonts folder instead of Fontbook:
http://glyphsapp.com/blog/testing-your-fonts-in-adobe-apps/
For some reason, exporting to the Adobe Fonts folder does nothing; the fonts don’t appear in InDesign’s Fonts menu.
Are they copied into the adobe fonts folder?
Yes they are. Anyway, I reset the fonts cache and the letters connect in TextEdit, but not in Word، InDesign, or Pages, which is where I really need to use the font. Is there a way to get it to work in those apps?
As in, is there a way for me to make a font in Glyphs that works with other apps the way the built-in font Al Bayan does? I did try opening Al Bayan in Glyphs and re-saving it to see what I would get, and I got disconnected letters.
Arabic fonts are sometimes sorted to the end of the font menu.
If you can’t find it there, can you send me the .glyphs file?
I did find it, and it did work in the ME version of InDesign. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of it not working in Pages, Word, etc.
I think only fonts that have AAT format, would work on Pages or Macintosh version of the Word (that doesn’t support Arabic officially anyway) and OpenOffice.
The fonts that Glyphs make, are Open Type which work fine in Text Edit, Adobe ME Suit, Mellel, Nisus etc.
In that case, can someone suggest a program I can import the Glyphs-generated font into, and then export to ATT?
AAT is probably too complex for a simple conversion. You can try FontForge or the Apple tools, but my guess is that simply resaving the font as dfont will not suffice.
From what I’ve heard, OS X does on-the-fly conversion of OTFs to AAT when they’re loaded. That’s why OTFs work in TextEdit and other apps that use the Apple text engine, and that’s why some features that do not have AAT counterparts, like locl, are not supported at all.
Strange enough, Pages uses a different text engine, that’s why there are always problems with font support in Pages. My advice: don’t invest too much energy in trying to get your font to work in Pages. IMO, the best bet is to hope for a new version of that app.
Well, I think it’s worth a shot. Thanks for the help.
The only tools I know of that can generate AAT fonts are some command line tools from apple that nobody outside of Apple really understands.
Have a look:
developer.apple.com/fonts/Tools/tooldir/AATFontTool/AAT%20Font%20Tool%20Documentation /MIF.html
Well, looks like it really isn’t possible. Exporting to dfont from FontForge gave me a font that wouldn’t join anywhere, even in TextEdit, and running AAT Font Tool gave me “Can’t continue with this font: The ‘fdsc’ table in the specified font is badly formatted” (Unless someone knows how to fix it?)
To save a font as .dfont does not make it “AAT”. AAT refers to some special tables in the font that are comparable with the GSUB/GPOS tables in OTF fonts. To generate this tables, you need to supply a .mif file. But the syntax for this file is not easy and there are no examples on how to properly implement none latin scripts.