Font called Badwrench not displaying properly in Affinity apps

[pixelstuff]

Using Windows 10, I was looking for a Goodwrench logo style font. Found one called Badwrench, but it doesn't display properly in any of the Affinity apps. All three Affinity apps appear to display Ariel (or something similar) when Badwrench is selected. 

http://www.nnracing.com/filelibrary.asp?fileid=23280

Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and Libreoffice Writer display it properly. Does anyone know what the problem might be?

[Old Bruce]

44 minutes ago, pixelstuff said:

a Goodwrench logo style font. Found one called Badwrench, but it doesn't display properly in any of the Affinity apps.

could be that it is a Postscript type 1 font, those are not supported. Could be it is a Coloured or Variable font those too are not supported.

[kenmcd]

That is actually a symbol font, and all of the characters/glyphs are encoded up in the PUA (Unicode Private Use Area). So when you type something you what are seeing is a fallback font (because the characters are not there at the expected Unicode code points).

Here is a quick conversion to Unicode: BadwrenchAF-Regular.zip

Note: This is a really bad font. The character weights are not consistent at all.
But you you should now be able to see it in AF apps.

 

[pixelstuff]

1 hour ago, LibreTraining said:

That is actually a symbol font, and all of the characters/glyphs are encoded up in the PUA (Unicode Private Use Area). So when you type something you what are seeing is a fallback font (because the characters are not there at the expected Unicode code points).

Here is a quick conversion to Unicode: BadwrenchAF-Regular.zip

Note: This is a really bad font. The character weights are not consistent at all.
But you you should now be able to see it in AF apps.

 

Thanks the converted font works.

Any idea what all the other Windows app are doing differently from Affinity apps that allowed them to work with the original? I've tried half a dozen different apps which all work. Is this a bug in the Affinity apps or something more quirky?

[kenmcd]

2 hours ago, pixelstuff said:

Any idea what all the other Windows app are doing differently from Affinity apps that allowed them to work with the original? I've tried half a dozen different apps which all work. Is this a bug in the Affinity apps or something more quirky?

I tested in LibreOffice and it appears they are showing the characters based on the glyph name.
But what really surprised me is the text search actually worked.

In early pre-Unicode Type 1 fonts the glyph name was used a lot rather than a specific code.
So my guess is this is a leftover from those days when Type 1 fonts were supported.
Affinity apps have never supported Type 1 fonts so there would no such leftover.
That's a weird one.

Hmmm ... did a little digging in the font file.
And it appears to be an old Macintosh encoded TrueType file.
Type 1 fonts from back then had a specific list of glyph names, and those were always in particular glyph numbers.
But those numbers don't match this TrueType font.
So I do not know exactly how this is working. 😵
But what I do know is these apps are using some old encoding mapping to be able to work.

The glyph names is how FontCreator converts it to Unicode.
And that is fairly quick and easy.

[MKKT3D]

I am having the exact same issue for CityBlueprint. 

I have tried 4 different versions of it and none of them will generate properly. 

I have attached it here hoping you could work a miracle on this one. 

But for future issues... How do I do this conversion on my own?

CityBlueprint.ttf

[kenmcd]

4 hours ago, MKKT3D said:

I have attached it here hoping you could work a miracle on this one. 

Quite a mess. But like the font style.
Try this: CityBlueprintAF.ttf

 

4 hours ago, MKKT3D said:

But for future issues... How do I do this conversion on my own?

Part of the problem is the original conversions are bad.
So there is no push-da-button type of conversions which will work.
This font had a bunch of errors.
The conversion to Unicode requires the correct name on each character.
Thirteen characters had no names.
Many characters had the wrong names (e.g. endash and emdash had wrong names).
As is typical with these old conversions the quotes are all messed-up.
Have to manually figure-out which is which and name them all properly.
And as is also typical the right single curly quote is missing.
So it takes quite a bit of manual tweaking, and some font knowledge to fix.
I fixed this in FontLab 7.
It will work now, but it is far from perfect.

If you had the original Type-1 font it would be easy to convert with TransType.
And it would probably do a better job than the original conversion here.