OS: OpenSUSE
Desktop: Gnome
Windows Manager: XCFE


According to my charmap program, Bitstream Charter contains macron vowels. However, they all have greater weight than the straight vowels, and (possibly because they are a little squashed in x-height) the a-macron is single-storey while the normal a is double-storey. This results in a passage of Maori looking as though really bad substitution is happening.

The font also contains the unicode combining macron glyph. I tried using that with a normal a, and something (LibreOffice, the OS?) decided "this font has an a-macron, I'll substitute that" - cue gnashing of teeth.

(I would include a screenshot but I'm guessing that newbies don't get the right to attach images?)

Can anyone see a way around this other than switching to a different font for the entire passage?

You can, like this: [img ]imageURL[/img ] without the spaces after the g.

Which version and which face of Bitstream's Charter are you talking about?

I will have a look when I get to work in the morning.

It's Postscript (Type-1) version 2.0-1.0
browsing through charmap, a lot of the extended character set looks heavy.



For now, I'm setting this passage in URW Palladio-L instead.

Bitstream Charter does not contain vowels macron.

Then
1) Why is my font inspector showing them?
2) Why does the a + combining macron character combo get overridden then?

okay: Experimenting with a font which makes it really obvious (archisto), some component in my system is attempting to make a wider unicode set available in every font (not all code points). There appears to be a serif and a sans-serif switched in to fill the gaps depending on the base font.

Now to identify what this system is and consider disabling it, as it doesn't seem to offer any positive benefits.

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/charter-bt-pro/roman/glyphs.html

I don't have a solution, but this isn't a weight issue - the macron vowels that appear in the image you've posted belong to a different font. I would imagine the same thing is true for all of the accented characters.

Yes, looks like they are replaced by Linotype's Frutiger Next (Bold).

@explogos, all versions of the Charter, ITC and BT have the Western European accents. Only the Bitstream pro otf version has also the Eastern European accents including the macron. Since TaranakiCathedral works with the Type1 version only the Charter Expert will have the characters needed.

@TaranakiCathedral, as English and Maori do not use Western European accents you can solve the problem by modifying the font file(s) a bit by changing the dieresis into a macron (in the standard ascii set all vowels have a dieresis). So it is simply changing 2 dots into a bar. Position is the same, size is the same ... thus ... bingo!

Also Paratype version has also the Eastern European accents.

http://www.paratype.com/pstore/fonts/ITC-Charter.htm

Yep. Of course

Quick check shows that the Paratype version is the BT Pro with the Cyrillic characters added.

...which is interesting, since I don't have Frutiger anything on my system. I have installed Fontforge and am trying to make sense of it.
(For example, the glyphs don't follow the unicode sequence - I guess the font predates unicode - and if I copy ä and paste it into an unused position, it replaces ALL the unused boxes)

Is there a good crash course on how to add glyphs to a font?

Richard

A year later, but I have just found a solution to this problem:
The (free licensed) font Claris SIL is based on Bitstream Charter and has an extended character set.

I'm happy - now to update all our file templates!