Importing Glyphs from Other Programs

It is possible to draw glyphs in a general purpose illustration application (Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator, etc) and import them as EPS or SVG.

Hand-coded SVG

How to prepare

• The SVG file needs to be set with viewBox="0 0 1000 1000".

• Width actually doesn’t matter, as long as it is wider than your glyph. But, the height at 1000 is important for easiest import.

• y=0 will be the ascender line and y=1000 will be the descender line.

• (There may be a few glyphs that go beyond those lines; perhaps FontForge will do the right thing but this hasn’t been tested.)

• By default FontForge will set up your baseline at y=800. In the FontForge coordinate system, the baseline is at their 0 point on their vertical access.

• To set the baseline where you want it in FontForge, take the y coordinate for your baseline in SVG. That will be the FontForge vertical point for the ascender line in their coordinate system. 1000 - y for the descender. Go to Element > Font Info and in the General menu, place the ascender value in the “Ascent” input and the decender in the “Descent” menu. Both will be positive. The Em Size should remain at 1000 (as that is the height in SVG units)

• When drawing the glyph, it is common to use relative coordinates. Start the glyph with <path d="M Xvalue,Yvalue. If the glyph can be drawn starting at a point all the way on the left, then Xvalue will be the default LeftBearing that FontForge uses. You can adjust this easily after glyph import (and may need to, anyway, after testing the font). It is also convenient to use the baseline value for the Yvalue.

• Always finish the path d attribute with a z. It will import without it, but without a z after the last point in the path, the glyph won’t display right in the main window until you restart FontForge.

• When drawing holes (like for the letter P), don’t start a new path node, just use a z at end of the first path and start a new path with mNewX,NewY to then start drawing the hole. Use the attribute fill-rule="evenodd" for the path, and it will work right.

Workflow

Use a web browser to render the SVG you are working on. You can use a file called template.svg that is 1200 by 1200 but renders at 800 by 800 so that it doesn’t scroll in the browser window.

In that template, draw guidelines at y=100, y=1100, y=(100 + {baseline, capheight, etc.}, x=100, x=1100.

Then import the SVG glyph you are working on into that document with <image xlink:href="LC_p.svg" x="100" y="100" width="1000" height="1000" />.

You can now hand-code your letter in one window, and refresh the browser in the other to see it drawn on top of the guidelines.

Custom Glyph Lists

Create a namelist.txt file, perhaps using a spreadsheet to list Unicode codepoints and glyph names. For example:

0xEC00 octDotDhe
0xEC01 octDotDheDbl
0xEC02 octDotDheTrpl
0xEC03 octDotDheQdrpl
0xEC04 octDotLik
0xEC05 octDotLikDbl
0xEC06 octDotLikTrpl
0xEC07 minirLik
0xEC08 minirDhe
0xEC09 minirBawah
0xEC0A soroganDhe
0x-001 soroganLik

For glyphs without a Unicode point, use a codepoint of -1, such as in the last line of the above example.

Then load FontForge and go to Encoding > Load NameList, and then use ‘Rename glyphs’, since ‘Load NameList’ only adds the custom namelist to the set of options available in subsequent rename commands.