Make your font work in Windows

Tutorial
Troubleshooting
by Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

19 May 2022

Have you also been trying to fix Windows with your font? Welcome to the club.

  • Vertical Metrics:
  • winAscent, winDescent cause clipping
  • use TTFAutohint Windows Compatibility bit
  • charset Win 1252, and all typeable characters you expect on the enduser keyboards, otherwise risk fallback font substitution
  • prefer TTF over CFF
    • embedding requires TTF
    • performance is much better
  • style linking (Naming tutorial):
    • RIBBI family: only R will show in menu, BBI accessible via B and I buttons
    • Style names for RIBBI: Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, do not be creative
    • this is the logic of Word menus, deal with it: accept that you cannot change Word into InDesign with some magical hack in your font
  • OT features and kerning:
    • none of this in PowerPoint
    • Word: educate your users to turn it on Ctrl-D (Cmd-D on the Mac)
    • Word hack: dist feature, but not recommended
    • for kerning to work, there should be at least one other GPOS feature in the font (mark or mkmk will do)