Select the glyphs to be used in your font

[Mike]

One of the most important things you need to do in Glyph Designer is select the glyphs you want to use in your font. You only need to include the glyphs that are going to be used by your application e.g. if you are just showing the score then you just need the digits 0 to 9, or maybe you are only going to be using uppercase characters so you don't need to include lowercase letters.

Glyph Designer makes it really easy for you to select the characters to use within the character select view. This view can be access by selecting the view button with the + icon in the tool bar.

The character selection view is broken up into three sections:

Unicode Blocks
Each font is made up of different unicode blocks. These are pages of glyphs as defined within the unicode standard. Not all fonts have glyphs within all the blocks, so Glyph Designer only displays the blocks in which the font actually has glyphs.

By selecting a block in this list the Characters table in the middle of this view will display the characters that are included in the selected block.
In this table is a column that shows you how many glyphs have been selected in each unicode block. This can be useful if you have selected characters across a number of blocks.

Characters
When you see characters you want to use in your font you can simply click the character in the Characters table and it will be highlighted to show that it has been selected. If you are selecting a number of characters then you can hold down the mouse button and simply drag over all the characters you want to select.
Deselecting a characters in done in the same way, by pressing the mouse button on an already select character will deselect it.
The small number at the top of each character cell is the unicode ID for that character. This is handy as it allows you to specify those characters in code if they are not characters on your keyboard.

Selected
This table shows all of the characters that have been selected across all fonts and unicode blocks. It is possible to select a character within a font and then switch to a font that does not support that character. If this happens then usually the Selected table will display a place holder for that character and this will also be displayed when viewing the atlas. To remove a character from the selected table you can double click that character. This will remove it regardless of the original font or unicode block it was originally from.

Only those characters in the Selected table will be used in your font.

Font Substitution
Glyph Designer gives you the ability to mix two fonts together using font substitution. If you are using a font that is missing some characters you need, switch on font substitution will cause Glyph Designer to try and match your current font with a similar font on your system and use that font to render the missing glyphs.

If the automatic selection is not what you want you can also select to use manual substitution. This means you can then manually select the font you want to be used for missing glyphs. If this font does not contain the glyph either then Glyph Designer will revert back to its selected substitute font for that one glyph.

All of these options are controlled using the checkboxes and drop down menus underneath the Unicode Blocks table.