Font Window and Font Map
An open font is more than the glyph currently being drawn. It is a collection whose coverage, consistency, and organization need attention throughout development. The Font window gives that collection a visible working form.
This Part teaches you to survey the font, recognize the information displayed, navigate its cells, and select targets for later work. These viewing and selection tasks prepare you to act; the operations that create or change glyphs follow in later Parts.
Glyph Sets
A glyph set is the ordered collection of glyphs a font contains. Each glyph also has a position in the font's internal order, represented by its glyph index, a number identifying its position in that font.
The collection is a design decision. A font intended for a limited set of symbols needs different coverage from a family intended for several writing systems. Alternate forms and ligatures can add glyphs without adding a corresponding set of separately encoded characters. The number of glyphs is therefore not simply a count of the Unicode characters supported.
A character standard identifies characters. A font's glyph set supplies the forms needed for its intended text and typographic behavior. Building that set involves deciding what is needed, recognizing what already exists, and keeping related forms organized as the design grows.
The word “set” also occurs in display choices such as the Glyph set selector used when creating a font. Such a choice can describe an intended or reference collection, including positions for glyphs not yet present. In this chapter, the font's actual glyph set means the glyphs that exist in the font. A displayed collection can be smaller or larger than that actual set.
The internal order is only one way to inspect the collection. Views can organize cells by script, encoding, Unicode category, or index without necessarily changing their stored order. A small project may contain a few hundred glyphs, while a broader family can contain thousands. Planning, extending, reordering, and resolving inconsistencies in that collection are central parts of type design.
The Font Window
The Font window is FontLab's main windowed environment for examining and managing a font's glyph set. With the usual font-window behavior enabled, opening or creating a font opens a Font window for it.
The window presents a visual inventory. Its grid lets you compare glyph images and identify their cells; its list presents glyph information in rows and columns. These views help you recognize the extent of the work before entering the drawing environment for an individual glyph. The Font window also provides a place to reorder the collection and choose encoding-defined sets. A subset helps concentrate on a planned portion; a larger reference set exposes positions to add. These display choices must be distinguished from creating or deleting the underlying glyphs.
The Font menu and Glyph panel provide routes to glyph-level operations such as editing names, assigning codepoints, and managing metadata. The inventory makes the targets visible before you act. For example, you can inspect a group of related letters, identify missing positions in the reference set, and select the existing glyphs that need metadata work. The later chapters teach those operations; here the important point is that the Font window is a workspace for managing the collection, not only a browser for opening drawings.
An inventory also provides context for operations. A later command can target one glyph or a selected group, and the window gives you a place to establish that group. Naming and character-assignment indicators draw attention to inconsistencies that require closer inspection.
Opening a font does not mean that every cell displayed represents a glyph already in the file. A reference set can include missing positions. An empty position has no glyph; a blank glyph exists but has no visible drawing.
More than one view
You can have Font windows for several fonts, and you can open more than one Font window for the same font through the Window menu's New Font Window command. Its wording may refer to a tab in a tabbed layout.
An additional Font window is another view of the same working font, not a copy of its data. It can be navigated independently and can present a different portion of the glyph set. Changes to the underlying font remain changes to that shared font.
Activating a Font window makes its font current: ordinary font-level commands then act on that font. The current-font context is distinct from the particular cells selected within the window.
Interface Modes
The Font Map panel presents the Font window's glyph-inventory interface in a dockable panel, including its Property Bar, Sidebar, Table view, List view, and Status Bar. It can remain available while you move among fonts, avoiding the need to keep a separate large inventory view visible for each one.
The Font Map presents glyphs as a visual collection, with filters at the left and glyph data alongside the cells.
Open it with Window > Panels > Font Map, and open Window > Panels > Fonts alongside it. The Fonts panel determines which font or fonts Font Map presents. Selecting one font there shows that font's glyph inventory in Font Map.
Choosing the inventory arrangement
In Preferences > Font Window > Font window, choose the behavior that suits the work:
- At least one Font window opens a Font window for each font. Closing that font's last Font window also closes the font, subject to the usual unsaved-change confirmation.
- Use Font map and Fonts panels lets fonts remain open without individual Font windows. Use the Fonts panel to choose the font and Font Map to inspect its glyphs. You can still open a Font window explicitly when needed.
This choice concerns how open fonts are accessed. Tabs, Both, and Windows instead control whether views share frames or open independently.
Comparing fonts
Open the fonts you want to compare. In the Fonts panel, click one font and Shift-click another to select a range; Cmd-click on macOS or Ctrl-click on Windows selects separate entries. With several fonts selected, Font Map can overlay their glyph images in the corresponding cells. Each contributing font uses a display color. Where forms coincide, the colors overlap; differences appear as separate edges or areas.
A glyph present in only one of the selected fonts contributes only that font's image. The absent glyph does not supply a second colored shape. This makes the overlay useful for comparing coverage as well as drawings.
The overlay is a viewing aid, not an automatic judgment that one drawing is correct. These font-level display colors are separate from the glyph flags introduced later.
The following chapters use “Font window” for the common inventory interface. Its ordinary viewing controls also apply to Font Map unless a difference is stated. A standalone Font window shows one font; Font Map can compare several. The overlay itself does not establish the targets of an editing command: check the target shown by that command or panel.