The CID Menu
The CID Menu provides a few commands for manipulating CID keyed fonts. If
the current font is a CID keyed font the menu also includes a list of all
subfonts that make up this one. This menu is only available in the font view.
Er... What is a CID keyed Font?
A CID keyed font is a postscript (or opentype) font designed to hold Chinese,
Japanese and Korean characters efficiently. More accurately a CID font is
a collection of several sub-fonts each with certain common features (one
might hold all the latin letters, another all the kana, a third all the kanji).
This allows font-wide hinting to be crafted for subsets of characters to
which have something in common.
CID keyed fonts do not have an encoding built into the font, and the characters
do not have names. Instead the font is associated with a character set and
on each character set there are several character mappings defined. These
mappings are similar to encodings but allow for a wider range of behaviors.
A CID is a character index and is used to look up glyph descriptions instead
of character names in other types of fonts. Using a character set FontForge
will often be able to map a CID to a unicode character name (but not always),
so FontForge will give characters names when it can.
For more information see the section on CID keyed
fonts on the font view page.
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Convert to CID
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If the current font is not a CID font then this command will convert it into
one containing one subfont (with the characters in this font). You will be
prompted for a character set.
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Convert By CMap
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If the current font is not a CID font then this command will convert it into
one containing a single subfont. You will be prompted for an Adobe CMap file.
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Flatten
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If the current font is a CID font then this command will convert it into
a normal (flat) font by taking all the characters from all the sub-fonts
and merging them into one normal font.
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Flatten By CMap
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If the current font is a CID font then this command will convert it into
a normal font. It prompts you for an Adobe CMap file and uses that to define
an encoding for the resultant font.
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Insert Font
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Will allow you to browse for a normal font which will be added as another
sub font to the current CID font.
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Insert Blank
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Inserts a blank sub-font into the current CID font.
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Remove Font
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Removes the current font from the CID font. Anything in it will be lost.
(If you want to save it first then use Generate Font and save it as a pfb
file (or any other simple format).
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CID Font Info
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This allows you to provide information on the entire collection of subfonts
rather than just the current subfont. It provides access to the standard
font info dialog.
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<sub font name>
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Clicking on a different sub font name in the menu will cause that sub-font
to be displayed instead of the current one.
Other menus
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