generating cross platform font problems

Wally · Post by **Wally** » Sat Oct 18, 2008 4:04 am

I bought a font program (TypeTool) to recreate an old Mac System 9 Font suitcase(Chemistry) I used years ago for MANY educational software stacks. My scripts use these special characters as well as lots of data in the fields.

I created the special characters(all in the ACSII range of 127 to 255) and the now modern True Type font displays/works flawlesslessly on my Macintosh. However, I can't get the windows version of the font to display the characters properly. The ASCII values of the windows font version I generated match the Mac version ASCII value, but the characters don't display in the scripts as on the Mac. I know the Windows ASCII values are correct because I use a Windows program "Font Viewer" to examine fonts.

I work on the stacks on my Mac, drag and drop them into XP running in VMWare Fusion and the scripts don't display the special characters in XP as they do on Mac. I know that the scripts are translated to iso 8859-1 Latin when they move to Windows but the characters don't match.

I must not be generating the Windows version of the font correctly with the TypeTool program but their support forum hasn't been very helpful.

Can anybody give me some hints on what to try next? It has to do with the code pages?

Wally · Post by **Wally** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 2:42 am

Ok, maybe what I'm trying to do is not possible. Is it possible to make a font whose ASCII characters 1-255 are the same in Windows and a Macintosh AND whose characters are the same in iso 8859-1?

In other words, can a file containing characters in the ASCII range 1-255 that is created on a Mac, be opened in Windows, then translated automatically(by my program) into iso 8859-1, and then displayed the same as on the Mac?

Does my question even make sense?

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Wed Oct 22, 2008 8:11 am

Hi Wally,

When you move a font from one platform to another, you don't need to translate them, provided that the operating system can deal with the font format (truetype, opentype e.g.).

The translation part comes when you transfer a text from one operating system to another. You need to use the isoToMac/macToIso functions to translate plain text.

Best,

Mark

Simon · Post by **Simon** » Sun Dec 21, 2008 10:59 pm

Hi,
Just a question about embedding fonts and this Typetool.
Using Typetool I can open Arial and do slight modifications. Does this new font now belong to me? Can I legally now embed this font?

Thanks,
Simon

Mark · Post by **Mark** » Mon Dec 22, 2008 12:42 am

Hi Simon,

You should read the license conditions that apply to the font. Probably, you are not allowed to re-distribute it in any form, not matter whether you changed it or not. A font is only yours if you created it completely from scratch or if someone has transfered copyright to you.

If you want to include a font with your stack for distribution, you have to find a font with a license that allows distribution of the font or make your own.

Best regards,

Mark

Simon · Post by **Simon** » Mon Dec 22, 2008 2:08 am

Hi Mark,
Thanks, I figured it wouldn't be that easy.
Just another question:
http://www.fontyukle.com/en/
This is an illegal site right? And by me posting the address I only compound the problem, so if the answer is yes then I hope I can come back and edit this post.

Thanks,
Simon