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fontsarabicglyphopentypelatin
Joey Dubois
Joey Dubois

Reputation: 21

How do I transfer several glyphs at once from one font file (otf) to another?

Basically, I have a few font files that currently have Latin alphabet glyphs and I want to import Arabic characters from a different font file to these font files. Yes, the Arabic glyphs are from a free-for-personal-use font, in case anyone was worried about that, and the Latin characters are from my own intellectual property. I just want to find a way to import all of the Arabic glyphs in a quick way that does not involve doing them one at a time. Is there a known quick-and-easy method? Thanks.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1601

Answers (1)

Ben Whitmore
Ben Whitmore

Reputation: 967

The best solution would be to figure out how to enable fallback fonts in your OS. Any OS that can read modern TTF or OTF fonts should support this. It would let you keep the fonts in their original form, which means less work, less testing and easier maintenance.

FontForge (a free tool) can merge fonts: see here. But I suspect this may not give an optimal result. Arabic fonts tend to contain many ligatures and other complex features, and I don't think all the internal font tables required for these features will be merged across. You'd have to test extensively to ensure that the Arabic results still looked good.

You may have more luck just opening both fonts in FontForge, selecting the full range of your latin glyphs from your own font, and copy-pasting them into the Arabic font. Then save the result as your merged font. That would mean any special tables for Arabic features are retained, while those for Latin glyphs (such as class-based kerning) are lost. Pairwise kerning would be retained. As the author of the Latin font, you'll have some idea of how successful this might be.

There are other font features that won't necessarily work well with both fonts, such as the ascender/descender metrics, blue values, etc. You could end up with poor rendering of Latin at small sizes, or even chopped off tops and bottoms of characters. These can all be fixed, but it takes time and careful testing. A well-made font is a highly tuned machine, and merging two fonts properly is a time-consuming process.

Upvotes: 1

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