The Font panel is the bird's-eye view of every glyph in the project. It pairs a categories tree on the left with a glyph grid on the right; the grid shows one cell per glyph with a caption above the rendered shape. Cells whose code-points have no real glyph yet show a sample character with light-grey outlines so missing characters are visible at a glance; an empty glyph without a code point shows the sample of the characters its glyph name stands for (three.dnom shows a 3).
Categories
The categories tree restricts the grid to a subset of glyphs and supports several groupings and orderings. Switch the active category with the Overview Toolbar.
Two categories worth noting:
•Unused — appears under Glyphs when the font contains glyphs that are not reachable through normal mappings. Such glyphs add file-size with no benefit; consider excluding them on export through the Options → Font tab.
•Scripts — lists every script the font covers. Characters used by multiple scripts (digits, punctuation, etc.) are listed once at the top, separately.
Glyph Sets
The Glyph Sets branch lists ordered character repertoires that are independent of the Unicode blocks and of the order of the glyphs in the font. Nineteen sets are built in, grouped by script: Microsoft's pan-European WGL4; Chinese > GB2312-80, the 6,763 characters of GB2312-80 in their standard order, with Level 1 and Level 2 as separate rows; the Google Fonts sets GF Latin Kernel, Core, Plus and Vietnamese, GF Cyrillic Core, Plus and Pro, and GF Greek Core; Christoph Koeberlin's Latin S, M, L and XL; and Adobe Latin 1-5. Each row shows how many of its members the font already has (277/345, say), and the grid shows the members in the order of the set; selecting a set never changes the order of the glyphs in the font. The branch and the sets' section rows start collapsed, and the tree remembers what you expand or collapse.
Complete Category in the right-click menu adds every missing member in one undoable step: encoded characters for code point entries and empty unencoded glyphs for entries given by glyph name. To add only part of a set, choose Missing Glyphs...: it lists exactly the members the font lacks, each with a preview of its character or characters, its glyph name, and its code point and Unicode name, and the filter box narrows the list by any of these. Select the members you want, or filter and press Select All - the selection is always exactly the highlighted rows - and Add adds them in one undoable step. Both commands are also available for Unicode blocks, and both recognize equivalent spellings of the same glyph name, so a member never counts as missing when the font has its glyph under another valid spelling.
Sets are plain text .glyphset files. The built-in ones ship in the GlyphSets folder of the program (its ReadMe.txt describes the format: a name, an optional folder, optional section headings, then one code point, range or glyph name per line). Put your own files in the GlyphSets folder of your FontCreator settings folder and restart; a file with the same name as a built-in set replaces it.
Selecting Glyphs
Besides clicking and dragging in the grid, the Edit menu offers Select All, Select Composites (every composite glyph), Select Tagged, Clear Selection and Invert Selection. Most commands in the Font panel act on the selected glyphs.
Filter by Tag
The Tags category filters the grid to glyphs carrying a chosen tag, with an extra No Tag filter that surfaces glyphs that have not yet been triaged — useful for tracking authoring progress.
Cell Captions
Each cell carries a caption above the glyph image. Choose what the caption shows from the Overview Toolbar or from the right-click menu in the Font panel: glyph name, Unicode name, code-points, or glyph index. Automatic follows the active grouping — if the grouping is by Advance Width, the caption shows the advance width.
Switch code-point captions between decimal and hexadecimal through the Options → View tab.
