diacritics

[Roger terry]

I am digitising a book with arabic names but I cannot find the correct diacritic. The character I need is a curve , open to the left, at the start of a letter and open to the right when used after a letter. The are a bit like single quotation marks but without the blobs on the bottom. Any ideas? Is it possible to create a character Designer and export it as a character? any ideas gratefully received.

 

[iconoclast]

Hi Roger!

I haven't made it yet, but you could use the free software Fontforge to create your own characters and complete fonts.

Edit: Another idea, but I think not the best: you could draw the character with designer, import it into your Publisher-document and pin it to the text.

[Roger terry]

Thanks, to be honest, I am old and FontForge looks too complex for me. I am stuck on one diacritic mark, (attached example) and in the book I am working on, it occurs a lot. It also occurs after the A the other way around, i.e. mirrored

[iconoclast]

Yes, your right, Fontforge looks  a little too complex to me too. But have you tested the other solution: drawing that character and pinning it to the text? That is verry easy. If you have pinned your character and placed it by dragging to the right place, you can select and copy it, and then paste it to every place you need it. For demonstration I attached two screenshots. The character I created is the red one. After you pinned and placed it, it will run with the text like a normal character.

 

[Fixx]

So, you have OCRd a book and need some way to add specific diacritics to characters using Publisher?

Correct way would be to find a font that has right diacritics. That may be a challenge if you are not familiar how to find diacritic or how to make sure right diacritics are included. 

Easy cheat if there is not too much of the affected text is to use inline graphic added like @iconoclast explained.

Adding diacritics to existing font is something typographers do all the time but takes some experience in the field.