Weird font behaviour

Someone reached out to me saying that that one of the fonts I released recently is not displaying correctly in Pages, MS Word and some other “not-so-much-opentype-aware” apps.
In all Adobe apps the font looks and and works fine while in the apps listed above it doesn’t.
Here is how it looks there:


the text at the top (in Calibri) is just to show what is being typed. When using the problemtic font, all spaces are replaced with the cent sign and all numbers are shifted - when you type “zero”, it shows up as a “one”, 1 as 2 etc. Besides all spacing looks weird.
Here is how it looks in Illustrator:

Any ideas why this is happening? Can this be caused by a huge file size - 12.5Mb? Or, perhaps using the unicode PUA?

Can you reproduce it yourself? Or is it only on the users machine?

Yes, I can reproduce in both Pages and MS Word

It looks a bit like a font cache problem.
What did you use the PUA codes for?

For all sorts of stylistic alternates

So… the font cache wasn’t the cause.
I’ve managed to fix the problem by removing 3 glyphs - gbreve.ss09, gcommaaccent.ss09, gdotaccent.ss09.
No idea why these three were causing the problem and no matter what i did to them - the problem was there until I simply removed them from the font completely.

Just curious how you discovered that these three glyphs were the issue? Did the app show some sort of error with those glyphs, or you just had to dig around for a while?

There was a bug in Pages that would show the second glyph in the font next to a page number. Could you send me the original file?

Adam,
First, I deleted PUA values assuming that it might have caused the problem - the problem wasn’t solved.
Then I deleted all alternates - the problem was solved.
Then I stared adding alternates back. All worked fine until I added ss09 style. Then I started removing groups from this style (a-letters, c-letters etc). When I reached g, the problem was solved. I added only g.ss09 back. Still worked. Added three diacritics - it stoped working. So… :slight_smile:

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Georg, I emailed the files!
Thank you!

Thanks for sharing, Elena :slight_smile: Quite a bit of digging, appreciate hearing how you went about trying to figure it out.

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