I suspect this has nothing to do with Glyphs, but I’ve got a strange problem in MS Word 2010 on Windows 10, and I’m running out of ideas to solve it. Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this distortion of the upper double quotation marks only? Here are two screen shots – the top one from InDesign where everything works, and the second one from Word:
The font is monospaced and works well in other applications. I’ve tried turning off and on various settings and advanced options in Word to no avail. It increases the width of the glyph and space between the two shapes within. Notice that the bottom double quote mark works as it should – which is even more surprising!.
That’s good thinking. But that doesn’t seem to be the problem.
I do have all quotation marks in the font:
quotesinglbase 201A
quotedblbase 201E
quotedblleft 201C – problematic
quotedblright 201D – problematic
quoteleft 2018
quoteright 2019
quotedbl 0022
quotesingle 0027
UnicodeChecker does not show anything out of the ordinary. I believe the clue is that it’s only creating a problem for the upper double quotation marks. That makes me think MS Word is to blame for this. But then again, I’ve also tried to generate one of my older fonts with this new version of Glyphs (1141), and it does not reproduce the problem in Word.
I’ve just exported the OTF without autohinting, but the problem is still there. I do have some characters that are hinted manually, but quotation marks have no hints.
EDIT: I’ve now deleted all hints from the font and exported OTF without autohinting, but the problem persists.
EDIT 2: Now I’ve formed a completely new empty Glyphs file. I drew just the H, comma and all quotation marks. Exported the OTF with no hinting and the problem is there again.
I wanted to try and generate the OTF file with an older version of Glyphs (specifically 1076). But when I download that version and try to start it up, it gives me the message: This beta version of Glyphs is more than 30 days old. Please check for an update.
OK, I’ve just installed Glyphs 1075 and generated the OTF. The problem persists. Then I’ve noticed that some other fonts in my system show the same problem with the Quotation Marks in MS Windows. It is especially evident in Adobe Devanagari and similar fonts. I guess that means it must be a Windows 10 problem, so I’m not going to waste any more time on this. If anyone gets the same problem, I suggest contacting Microsoft Support – good luck with that. Or, go with the TTF files, they work fine.
Thank you @mekkablue and @GeorgSeifert for the help!
I have a suspicion that quotedblleft is replaced with two consecutive quoteleft characters. As you say, that could be a substitution the layout engine does. Perhaps the language setting or some preference in Word can change that.
It is only appearing in Word on Windows, right?
If you want to double check, you can send me the .glyphs file, and I’ll see if I can reproduce it.
Right. And I believe your guess about the cause of the problem might be right too. Thank you for the offer to further investigate this, but I simply refuse to go deeper in that black hole that is MS Word. I already wasted a week on this. The important thing for me is that neither my actions nor Glyphs are causing the problem. And if any of my customers complain to me about this – TTF file solution will suffice.
Thank you again for your efforts to get to the bottom of this. I don’t know if you get this often, but you and Georg are amazing. Your work on this forum and tutorials on your site are worth more than any software anyone can make.
