Generate Font Dialog

This generates font files, both outline and bitmap. You may choose not to generate either, you may generate an afm file or a pfm file, you may select the type of postscript output, you may select which pixelsizes of bitmap to generate.

The outline types are:

The bitmap types are:

The options dialog provides the following check boxes. Not all are enabled at all times.

TTF (and Open Type) fonts are usually generated in Unicode encoding, there will also be a tiny macintosh encoding of whatever bits of MacRoman fit in the first 256 glyphs (and a macintosh copy of the unicode encoding) -- the exceptions are: symbol fonts will use the symbol encoding, KSC5601 and Wansung fonts will use Wansung, Johab fonts will use johab, JIS208 and SJIS fonts will use SJIS, Big5 will use big5 encoding. Fonts with a "Full Unicode" encoding will have both a 2 byte unicode encoding table and a 4 byte table. OpenType CID keyed fonts will be saved with Unicode encoding.

Postscript fonts are generated in whatever encoding the font is using (except if you take a two byte encoding and generate a Type1 font (rather than a Type0) then only the first few characters will be encoded). Type0 does not support a full Unicode (4 byte) encoding.

PS CID (and OpenType CID in the CFF) are saved with no encoding. The encodings live in seperate cmap files which are available from adobe (and perhaps other font vendors).

If you save a CID font with a format other than PS CID or OpenType CID, then only the currenly displayed subfont will be saved, with the current meaningless character ordering (I suppose this is useful if you wish to extract a sub-font from a CID font).

SVG fonts don't really have the concept of an encoding other than Unicode.

TTF (and OpenType) fonts will produce vertical metrics tables if the font has vertical metrics enabled. Postscript encodings will not produce Metrics2 dictionaries (If someone actually wants this let me know, it can be done, but I get the impression that nobody uses this any more).

On Mac OS/X, when generating a resource font containing a postscript font then the fontname textfield will not be present (as the filename is determined by the fontname). You can still select a directory however.

The bitmap sizes must all be present in the font database. AntiAliased fonts can be indicated by following the pixelsize by "@<depth>" (ie. "@8").

If you are generating a bdf font then you will be prompted for a resolution later.

If you generate a TrueType or OpenType font without the Apple mode set then PfaEdit will generate GPOS, GSUB, and GDEF tables. These contain kerning, ligature information, arabic forms data, anchor points, etc.

Apple does not support these OpenType layout tables. If you set Apple mode 'kern', 'opbd', 'morx', 'feat', 'lcar' and 'prop' tables may be generated instead. (and a couple of other small differences will appear).

If you set both Apple and OpenType then both sets of tables will be generated. If you set neither, then only the 'kern' table will be generated, and it will only contain pair-wise kerning (no kerning classes, no kerning by state machine). This is the kind of kerning available in the original truetype spec (from which both Apple and OpenType have diverged, but which both still support).


Generate Mac Family

This brings up a dialog very similar to the above, but with a few added fields. Because this dialog is for Mac families, only Mac formats are supported.

Right above the [Save] button is a list of all fonts that PfaEdit thinks should be included in this family, along with their bitmap info. If you don't want a font to be in the family simply uncheck its checkbox.

The font styles that are allowed in a family are limitted by the capabilities of the mac 'FOND' resource which only allows one style of a given type and does not support the concepts of "Light", "Black" (if there is already a "Bold" style), "Oblique" (if there is already an "Italic" style), etc. Generally PfaEdit will be able to figure out a font's style from its fontname, but in some cases you may wish to override this by setting the mac style directly in fontinfo.

For information on creating mac font families beyond the capabilities of this dialog look at the FAQ.


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