User Guide

by people who design non-Roman fonts.
Original encoding is like an elephant; it never forgets the
encoding of the font at the time it was first opened in
Fontographer. This is a very handy way to get back to
where you began—wherever that was. This can be useful
when opening fonts with strange encodings such as Sonata,
Carta, or Zapf Dingbats.
Adobe Standard encoding (ASE) is Adobe’s default
encoding. In a Macintosh font, ASE will allow for the
substitution of 16 characters from the Symbol font (see the
tip to the left of this paragraph).
Adobe Expert is the encoding required for fonts known
as “expert sets.” These typically include small caps, swash
caps, old style numerals, superior and inferior characters,
and special text symbols. You would want to use this option
only if you are creating an expert font set.
ISO Latin 1 is the encoding preferred by most UNIX
based systems. Select this option if you are generating a
font for Sun Computers.
Macintosh encoding lets you use your font on a Macintosh
and maintain keystroke compatibility with other Macintosh
fonts. This is very similar to Adobe Standard Encoding, but
it will put something in every spot (assuming you have
enough characters for that!) and won’t substitute the
symbol characters. Also, characters can appear in the
lower 32 slots.
Windows lets you create a Windows 3.1 PostScript or
TrueType .fon. On the PC, you also have the option of
Windows 95.
Windows Unicode Glyph List (Uni-code Glyph List on
the PC) gives you access to the full character set for
Windows 95. Your database will change to the appropriate
size (2,147 on the Macintosh and 1,267 on the PC), and you
can begin filling your character slots with characters from
Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Eastern European, and
other languages.
OS/2 Unicode Glyph List gives PC users access to the
full OS/2 character set.
OEM encoding is a pretty plain encoding vector that lists
Fontographer User's Manual
7: Generating and Exporting Fonts Page #12