creating special characters in a font

[jenbroberts]

Hello all

for the last 2 months I've been in the process of creating my first font. I started by sketching out all my letters, punctuation and numbers in an art program called artrage. Then I exported my artrage file to illustrator and I've spent most of the last 2 months tweaking,fixing and perfecting every character. I've had many feelings of doubt and uncertainty throughout this whole process, but the one part I feel totally uncertain about is creating special characters. (ligatures, uncommon symbols, and everything past the basic alphabet. I don't even know where to begin. I know this part isn't necessary for a beginner, but I want my first font to be successful and possibly have selling potential, so I'm willing to do what it takes. My biggest questions are: there are thousands of symbols/special characters-Which ones should I focus on/which ones can I leave out? Do I have to create each of these individiually just as I did with the other characters? Is there a special feature or tool that makes this part easier? 

Please help and bare with my noobish questions as I am new to the specifics of font design

Thanks everyone

[Wrzlprmft]

10 hours ago, jenbroberts said:

there are thousands of symbols/special characters-Which ones should I focus on/which ones can I leave out?

You get a good orientation from Unicode blocks. Assuming that your font is for the Latin alphabet, the following blocks should be of primary interest:

1. Basic Latin – you should really support all visible characters in there.
2. Latin-1 Supplement and Latin Extended-A – most of these characters are needed by some language; the rest is needed for some kind of text. There are some relics though that you do not need to support anymore, in my opinion: ¤, ¦, ¬, ¶, ʼn, Ţ, ţ. However, supporting these characters may be useful in some font shops or similar which categorise your fonts by supported Unicode blocks. Some capital letters are only used for all-caps and thus there is no need to support them if using your font for all-caps is a bad idea anyway: Ȩ; Ų, Ð, Ÿ, Ŀ, and probably some more. The ſ (long s) is basically only interesting for historical use.
3. The other Latin blocks of Unicode are mainly supporting exotic or dead orthographies or languages, respectively, with the following exceptions: A large number of characters is needed by Vietnamese; Ș, ș, Ț, and ț are needed by Romanian; Ə and ə are needed by Azerbaijani; Ẁ, ẁ, Ẃ, ẃ, Ẅ, ẅ, Ỳ, and ỳ are needed by Welsh.
4. The quotation marks, spaces and dashes from General Punctuation are something that you should support, in particular since they are not much work.
5. Finally, some characters from Letterlike Symbols and Currency Symbols are relevant in some contexts, e.g., ™ and €. You should also consider supporting the minus sign (−) from Mathematical Operators.

I collect some specific advice for designing diacritics and similar special characters here.

 

10 hours ago, jenbroberts said:

Do I have to create each of these individiually just as I did with the other characters? Is there a special feature or tool that makes this part easier?

There are two primary techniques for characters with diacritics:

1. Your font-creation program can automatically assemble characters once you have created the diacritic mark and the base character. You can then fine-tune the position of the diacritical mark manually.

2. You can use anchors, which are special points that you assign to each base character that mark where certain diacritics should be placed.

The first method may be useful if your font is rather non-standard (e.g., a script or blackletter font) and simple anchors do not suffice for a proper positioning of diacritical marks. Otherwise, I recommend using anchors. As a bonus feature, anchors can be used by the font rendering software to properly render characters that have no specific Unicode slot (e.g., ð̧) or that you did not explicitly implement.

 

Finally, a short remark on ligatures: Implement them, whenever your typeface needs them to look good, not because there is a Unicode point assigned to them (those are deprecated anyway). For example, if there is no collision in the letter sequence fi, you do not need the corresponding ligature.

[Ralf Herrmann]

Which characters:
For a commercial Latin/Western font, fill at least Latin1 and Mac Roman. 

How to design:
This is a good source: http://diacritics.typo.cz

How to do it technically:
Vector drawing apps like Illustrator won’t get you very far. As already mentioned, use a font editor as soon as possible in the process. They are made for this and can help you with specific problems such as reusing components for diacritics, which can then be edited and aligned globally for all characters that use these components.