Make your own dngbat fonts with Inkscape

[mtbill]

I tried creating a font using this method and it turned out reasonably well, but I have some problems. Maybe some of you who have tried this can offer some advice. I am a complete newb with Inkscape.

First, carriage returns show up as big black boxes. I can get around that by selecting all the carriage returns and changing the font to a conventional font, but that is a pain. Is there a way to get rid of the big black box?

Second, I realize now that I should have mapped all the unmapped uppercase glyphs to their lowercase counterparts. Since I didn't do that, the font reverts to the default whenever I accidentally hit an upper case for a glyph that was not set. Is there any way to copy the glyphs for a lower case to an upper case, without re-importing, re-tracing, etc?

[mtbill]

Well, I figured out what was causing the black boxes for carriage returns. Apparently I added a blank glyph in Inkscape and when the font was translated to TrueType, the blank glyph got mapped to CR. I was able to use FontForge to delete it. (I couldn't find any way to delete it in Inkscape.) So, maybe that will save someone some trouble in the future.

(Incidentally, fonts are much more complicated than I would have guessed.)