Here is my real response to this thread, submitted earlier today, now stripped of two hrefs that may have caused the reply to a February thread to be re-dated. Are we not supposed to insert links? Anyway, here goes:
Are we talking print? If so then coding of the glyphs doesn’t matter so long as they appear correctly on paper. “Correctly” allows a lot of leeway, but even pair kerning is relatively simple and accessible in Postscript Type 1 fonts of the previous century. However, if there is a chance your efforts may become available electronically then you should ensure the encoding is correct.
Font technology didn’t stand pat with PS Type 1, and Opentype opened a new era of “intelligent,” much more complex fonts. Nice as Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro is (mine dates from 2005), and although it does offer macron vowels (if that is what you mean by “vowels with lines above them”), it includes neither the dotted letters you need nor the special “Combining Diacritics” Unicode added in the range U+0300–036F. Even when font licenses allow modification, actually adding new diacritcs or letter-diacritic combinations takes professional tools whose cost is steep in both dollars and learning curve: simply preserving the kerning when modifying a nice, modern typeface isn’t trivial, though this is fundamental for maintaining typographic quality.
Before attempting to de-compile a complex Opentype font you might want to look into Peter Kahrel’s script for entering diacritics in InDesign. I see that he renders underdots with the “Spacing Dot Above”, U+02D9, which may be more common in existing fonts but could mislead electronic searching and indexing; he re-positions this by means of a character style, allowing one to substitute a “Combining Dot Below” (U+0323) borrowed from a more recent font. In an update to his documentation he points to Jongware’s Indyfont, an amazing—and free—InDesign javascript for making single-character fonts from within InDesign. One fly in the ointment is that you lose automatic kerning when you change fonts unless you can live with ID’s “Optical Kerning” (or set up Kahrel’s kerning script); if Indyfont works for you then you might want to buy the Pro version (note that, useful as it is, it doesn’t attempt to replace a true font editor).
However, a careful Arabic transcription project sounds like lots of dotted characters, and good kerning doesn’t just happen. I’d look seriously at what fonts are out there with the characters you need already built in, particularly in the scholarly world—proper Sanskrit romanization also requires many dotted letters.
I hope my href links survive, if not a search engine should quickly find Peter Kahrels’s site.
Good luck
David
