Setting up Arabic font. Basic view has empty character slots

Design
1

Hi All.
I’m trying add Arabic characters to my typeface. So I generate the Arabic glyphs. Now I have a greyed out image in the character slots. This as you know disappears when you start to draw. As I think it would be useful to have the correct characters in the background I assign a background using an Arabic font. The only way I can view these characters is in view all. In the basic view the slots are all empty. Is this making sense to anyone?

All I want to do is have an Arabic font as background to draw characters that harmonize with my Roman font.
Thanks for any help

2

The glyphs in the background are not a template to draw your shapes but just a reminder in what glyph you are.

3

I understand that George. What I want is an Arabic font as a template to draw my shapes.

4

You can use the UnicodeChecker app to give you the current glyph in any of the installed fonts on your system. Click the arrow next to the glyph name in the info box. If you don’t have the app, yet, it will tell you where to get it.

5

I’m sure I’m overlooking something very simple. But this is whats happening.

  • I open my own font.
  • I generate basic Arabic characters.
  • This as you know creates the character slots for Arabic with greyed out Arabic characters
  • These disappear when one begins to draw
  • I open an existing Arabic font and assign this as a background.
  • The roman characters now have a glyph in the background layer but the Arabic characters do not.
  • Viewing basic shapes in my font shows me the greyed out Arabic character slot.
  • Viewing basic shapes in the existing Arabic font displays nothing
    As I said I’m missing something basic
6

If you want to assign background, the glyph names must be the same. Existing fonts probably do not have the same naming scheme. You can try Glyph > Update Glyphs Info before assigning.

But again, the placeholder image is simply to give you a rough idea which letter you are working in. It is not intended to facilitate plagiarism or be in the way of your design. The whole point is to be gone once you draw something.

As rough reference you can perhaps better try the Show Character plug-in from Window > Plugin Manager.

7

All I needed was a rough reference and thank you for that. I don’t need to be reminded to avoid plagiarism