Creating Custom Glyphs

[MinaHabibi]

Hi,

Is it possible to create a custom glyph? One of my clients is an Indian reservation and some of their words have a dot over the c. I believe Times New Roman has this as a standard glyph but the font I use for them most of the time is ITC Garamond. No glyph for this character and I can't take putting little dots over the c's and then grouping, etc... It's a pain. Sometimes we might use a different font so if there's a way to customize the glyphs that would be great. I'm on a Mac with InDesign CS2 (CS3 in about a month)

Thanks
Mina

 

[jmgalvin]

To find available glyphs:

Go to System prefs/International. Click on Input menu button and check the "show input menu" at the bottom of the window. If you're in the US, you should see an American flag appear near the clock on your menu board.

Once that's there, click on it and pick Show character pallette. Now you have a lot of choices. You can select glyphs from the View menu in the character pallette, but you can also try Roman and then pick Accented Roman (c with dot above will be there - capital & lower case). Once you find it, and click it, you'll get an expanded window below that will give you every font that the character is available in.

When trying to find glyphs, you can also pick Unicode in the View menu and you'll get zillions of options. Look at Latin extended for lots of accents.

Once you find what you need - in the font you need or one that's reasonable, you can add to Favorites. Then when you need it, open the Character pallette, clcik on Favorites button, select the glyph you need and hit Insert.

OSX has potent character abilities once you get used to them.

You also might find that Open Type fonts that you got with ID or Creative suite have more glyphs than PS or TT.

Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[jimoblak]

If necessary, you can also modify or create a font to include special characters.

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

is a free option - - but font design it is not for casual use. It is very easy to screw up a font and the way that your system indexes fonts if you are not mindful.