User Guide

FontLab 4
70
Mapping Encoding Tables
The Encoding Table defines links between character codes and names,
assuming that all characters in the font have name-based identifiers. The
table is loaded and stays stored in memory while the font is used.
Character selection processing consists of two stages — conversion of the
code to a character identifier and searching the font for the location of the
character de sc ription with th e known ide ntifie r:
41 42 43 20
5A 5D 6F 55
56 57 58 59
5A 5B 5C 5D
5E 5F 60
20 space
21 excl am
22 quotedbl
23 numbersi gn
24 dol l ar
25 per cent
41 A
42 B
!
excl am
“
quot edbl
#
number si gn
$
dol l ar
%
per cent
A
A
B
B
Source text
as sequence
of codes
Identification of characters in the font
Fon tEncoding table
The Encoding Table can also add more flexibility to fonts. You can put
many more characters into one font, assign a unique name to each
character, and supply several encoding tables, allowing you to select
different sets of characters in the font when you use different encodings.
For example, in symbol fonts the Greek characters take places that are
usually occupied by Latin characters. With the encoding tables you can
include both sets of characters. Just assign the correct names (like alpha
for the ‘A’ character and A for the ‘A’ character) and later you can choose
the symbol encoding to work with the Greek version of your font or choose
Roman encoding to use the Latin characters.
In FontLab you can include up to 6,400 characters in a font. You can also
select any of the predefined encodings to examine a font and then include
it as the default encoding upon export.
You even can create your own custom encodings and use them to properly
assign names to your characters.