If FontLab has appropriate/relevant/related glyphs and вЂњknowsвЂќ this, it will try to use those existing glyphs to put outlines and not just empty space into newly created glyphs. (Note: having large numbers of blank glyphs may make your font harder to develop and test.) FontLab will still give them a width, but until you add outlines to them they will just show as empty spaces. No matter which of these three methods you use, if you have no usefully related glyphs already in your font for FontLab to draw on, these will be blank glyphs. If you need to instantiate glyphs not shown in your encoding, or want more options when adding them, the Add Glyphs and Generate Glyphs options on the Font menu can be used to add glyphs to your font (see below). A generated font will still use вЂњcorrectвЂќ names and encoding will be maintained.Дouble-click on slots shown in your current encoding view to create new glyphs. This will allow you to see friendly names for all your glyphs in the Font Window, rather than glyph names using only Unicode numbers. To see friendly names, go to Preferences > Open Fonts > вЂњConvert uniXXXX and afiiXXXX to friendly namesвЂќ. If you are working on a font for a script other than Latin or Greek, consider using friendly names, which can be created in the Preferences. You can change the default view mode and the default encoding in Preferences > Font Window.ДЇor a basic western-Europe character set, consider the вЂњOpenType StandardвЂќ encoding. The default encoding for new and newly opened fonts is вЂњOpenType LatProвЂќ which offers a large character set of over 400 glyphs, covering western and central European Latin-based languages such as English, French, German, Polish, Latvian, Romanian and Turkish (among others). Others are Codepages, Unicode Ranges, Categories and Scripts.

See Glyph Naming and Encoding for more details.ДЇontLabвЂ™s default view mode is вЂњEncodingвЂќ. This can be useful to show you which glyph slots you may wish to populate. We call this an вЂњEncoding.вЂќ You can switch your Encoding view at any time. In a Font Window, you can view a specific set of glyph slots in a defined order, whether or not the glyphs in question are even present yet in your font.

How do you decide which glyphs to create? This depends on your goals, but FontLab provides several helpful tools. FontLab will help you with glyph names and Unicode encoding, and will set appropriate Unicode range and codepage flags as needed in the generated font, based on the encoded glyphs present in the font. Making a Font From Color Vector GraphicsДefining language support for fonts in FontLab VI requires selecting the glyphs you want to create, and then designing them and including the appropriate OpenType features.Detecting Element References or Composites.