User Guide

or it can choose the character which corresponds to the
encoding vector of the computer currently running
Fontographer. On the off-chance that that explanation
wasn’t entirely crystal-clear, let’s run through an example.
Suppose you’ve opted to run Fontographer on the
Macintosh, you have opened an Adobe Standard encoded
font, and this preference item has been set to “Use the
font’s encoding to choose the character.” What is going to
happen now can be a little confusing if you’re not used to
thinking in this manner. Fontographer, even though it is
running on a Macintosh, will not use the Macintosh-
standard character encoding. It is instead going to use the
character ordering of the Adobe Standard encoding. For
most of the alphabet and “normal” characters, you won’t
notice a difference. If you choose “a” from the
keyboard, “a” is going to get highlighted in the Font
Window. However, if you press “Option-2,”
the “quotedblleft” character will get highlighted instead of
the expected “trademark” character which Macintosh users
expect to get when they key in “Option-2.” This is
because “Option-2” from the keyboard maps to character
number 170, and character number 170 in the Adobe
Standard encoding is not “trademark” like it is in the
Macintosh encoding, but is “quotedblleft.” To
get “trademark” when you type “Option-2,” change the
preference so Fontographer will use the machine-specific
encoding vector.
The main point of all this is, unless you are doing a lot of
cross-platform font development or have some other reason
to be messing with different encodings, keep this preference
set to use your computer’s encoding vector. That way,
you’ll get what you expect.
When reading an outline font
Before reading this section, read the previous section
called “Using the keyboard to choose a character.” These
two preferences are very closely related. Essentially, this
preference item allows you to either see the font in its
original encoding (which will typically be Adobe Standard
encoding for most PostScript fonts), or to see the font in the
encoding of your particular computer. We recommend,
Fontographer User's Manual
10: Expert Advice Page #3