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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1234839
character that doesn't have a unicode? Perhaps the website, book or magazine you're working on often includes little graphical symbols, or you'd like to simply have a scalable version of your company logo that works in all apps. These symbols aren't "text characters", so they don't have unicodes, yet fonts are a great way to store and use them! You can add them to an existing font under Private Use Area unicodes (from E000 to F0FF). Better still, make a "Symbol font" and put them there. In FontLab 7, adding symbol glyphs is easy: copy-paste a symbol from a vector drawing app like Adobe Illustrator or A· nity Designer, or from an image editor like Photoshop. If you give your fi les appropriate names, you can even drag-drop many images at once (fi gure 3), and turn them into smooth scalable contours with FontLab's built-in font- optimized autotracer (fi gure 4). Some advanced type designers like to make fonts with alternate glyphs. Let's say you're making a font where the "R" and the "A" should join nicely. In FontLab 7, you can create a ligature glyph with the name "R_A.liga", and FontLab will instantly build the magic "OpenType feature" code that makes ligatures appear automatically in many modern apps (figure 5). You can even make such automatic substitutions context-dependent, so different versions of a letter appear before or after certain other letters. Type designers have used this technique extensively for handwriting and script fonts — check out Laura Worthington's video tutorial on Making Connected Script Fonts if you aren't afraid of some very simple coding. Your fonts are infinitely variable and almost infinitely expandable. With a few tweaks like those we mentioned above you can vastly increase their repertoire. For more information, visit: www.fontlab.com Figure 3. You can drag-drop named pictures directly into a font.