How to most easily add a glyph to a font (such as a diacritic)?

Question

What is the easiest way (or one of the easy ones) to add a glyph (such as a letter č) to a font that doesn't have it? I would create that glyph from another glyph. For example, to create the glyph č, I would use c and v.

I have a few fonts but they are missing some characters that I need to use the font in my language (Slovenian) - čšž, so I would like to manually add them. So open a font, add the glyph and save.

And please don't just give me a name of a program that can do that cause I've tried a few (like FontForge), but haven't been lucky, so I would be grateful for a short numbered list of steps.

These fonts come in all format types, but it doesn't really matter to me - if the application requires a certain font format, I'll just convert my format to the required one.

Answer 1

Instead of adding characters to your font, just enter a combining diacritical character for the glyph after the letter you want to modify. From the chart on wikipedia, it looks like U+030C would make a mark that looks like your glyph. Here it is combined with a space, and a an english 'c' respectively: ̌ c ̌. The forum changes the way it looks though, as do different applications, and maybe even your browser. I use this technique all the time with U+301 "combining acute accent") for entering stress marks onto Russian characters. They're not part of the language, but useful for learning, and this works in Microsoft Office programs, decent text editors that support unicode, and my favorite flash card creation program (Anki).

See a chart of combining diacriticals here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character

You can automate typing them with AutoHotKey, but you should work out the details first by copy/pasting from here or from the chart on wikipedia into the applications you use to see if this solution meets your needs.

Best of luck.