Back in the days, a quarter century ago, there was no Unicode yet, no standardisation above 256 glyphs anyway. What I have is 2 weights, just normal and bold. And I have 3 styles: roman, smallcaps and italic. Together this at the moment means 6 fonts and all in a truetype and a postscript version. Some glyphs are at non-standard places in the font, because there was not enough room.
What is the proper way to make a modern version of these 6 fonts? Later on I can expand it, but the base has to be good.
If you have the option to completely re-work the fonts without having to guarantee backwards compatibility with older versions, I would highly recommend combining all characters in one font file.
- discard the old glyph order
- update the glyph names and Unicodes of all glyphs (Glyph > Update Glyph Info)
- use OpenType features for things like small caps. Name your small caps with an .sc suffic (a.sc, etc.) and go to Font Info > Features > Update, this will automatically add the c2sc and smcp feature code.
- verify the export naming in order to ensure style linking, among other things.
Run your fonts through fontbakery.com (TN profile, for example) in order to verify functionality.
There are two tutorials about this, with different angles:
Thank you both! The first step will be the most difficult one. I don’t have the original Fontographer 3.5 files, that computer died in january.
Completely re-working the fonts looks as the best thing to do. I am not going to alter the design at all, it works fine.
The first step is to open my regular font in Glyphs and save it under a new name? Later on I can add smallcaps and italic into that file??
Small caps: yes. See the tutorials for details on how to best name the glyphs.
Italics: typically in a different file.