I have really enjoyed the contributions to and development of the post about a Custom Font script.

It reminded me, off on a tangent, of an old word macro that I wrote in a previous existence to convert text from one font into another dedicated joined-up writing font that I used to create resources for teaching joined up writing to seven year-old children in school. That macro was based on a program that I had written years earlier in BBC Basic on the Acorn Archimedes series of computers (in the UK). The Arm Chip of mobile phonr technology developed, I suppose, from those beginnings at Acorn.

Anyway I found that I still had a copy of the old font and set about converting the word macro into python script just for fun. The conversion was an amazingly easy process but the script failed every time at the final stage of writing the characters into a text layer; Gimp mumbled something about an error displaying certain characters.

I could not find any real helpful information at all but concluded that the character set was not being correctly decoded in python. When the original program was written there were only ASCII character maps - not all the various font encodings that are used now, and so I had to squeeze all the extra joining characters into the character range 160 to 255.

On searching online I came across the clue I needed to access the right encoding for my font - and it was right here on the Gimp Chat forum answered by Ofnuts. Thank you Ofnuts - when you answered the original post you were also soving my problem (3 years later). My brain was aching - if only I had thought to search here first!!!

The link to that post:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=6875

Anyway - here is a sample output of the script to join up those darn letters that six and seven year-olds had to sweat so hard over:

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And here is the character map of the actual font.

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