Building accented characters»

While the upper and lowercase letters A–Z may be sufficient to write English, any typeface requires accented characters to support European languages like French, German or Spanish (and even languages from Africa, as well as from Asia like Vietnamese). In this tutorial, we will learn how to create diacritics and then use them to build accented characters with the help of Components.

Components, which can be used in FontLab VI’s predecessor Fontlab Studio 5 as well as in other font-making applications, are a standards compliant way to build glyphs from other glyphs. A component points to a source glyph, and contains information about its metrics and anchors. Once used to build another glyph, a you can apply transformations, such as shift, optionally also scale, rotation or slant, to a component to suit the needs of the newly created glyph without modifying the original one.

Let us start with a simple accent, the acute. First, we will add the acutecomb glyph to our font. To do that, go to Font > Add Glyphs, and in the dialog, select Nonspacing Mark. Here, click on the second accent in the grid, the acutecomb, and then press Ok.

Now open this glyph by double clicking on it in the Glyph window and draw the accent. Once you have drawn the acute, it is time to add anchors.

An anchor is a special type of point, represented, by default, as a red rhombus with its name attached to it. Anchors can be used to attach glyphs to each other at specified positions, and we will use them today to build the accented character aacute. Anchors works in pairs, and we will need to create two anchors, one in the base character a and the other in the accent character acutecomb. The anchor in the a will be called top, while the one in the acutecomb will be called _top. When two anchors are named in this way using the underscore, FontLab knows that they snap to each other. Remember that in each pair of anchor names, the base anchor always has the name without the underscore, while the name of the accent anchor always starts with the underscore.

Open the glyph a. To add the anchor, Ctrl-click anywhere in the empty space of the editing field and select the Add Anchor command from the contextual popup menu. FontLab will create an anchor, and automatically name it top, because it is the first anchor you have added to a base glyph.

You can move the anchor by selecting it and dragging, or be entering the X and Y coordinates of the new location in the appropriate fields in the Property bar.

Now open the glyph acutecomb in the Glyph window. Repeat the same steps to create a new anchor. The newly created anchor will, this time, be named _top, because it is the first anchor added to an accent glyph.

Now if you double-click on the empty aacute cell in the Font window, FontLab will automatically build the glyph using the components a and acutecomb.

To create several such accented glyphs in one single operation, you can use the Generate Glyphs dialog. Make sure you have all the base characters and anchors ready with the correct anchors, and then go to Font > Generate Glyphs to open the Generate Glyphs dialog. Go to the Custom tab, and enter the names of the accented characters in the input field. Make sure that Rebuild existing glyphs and Use anchors are selected in the sidebar, and press OK.

FontLab will create all the glyphs using components automatically.

Learn more about anchors and components in FontLab VI manual.