On Thursday 7 October 2010 the Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady font was useful in an unusual way in a situation that some readers might find of interest.
That day I had the idea that the problem for people who cannot eat gluten-containing food of knowing that food served to them in a hotel, restaurant or café really does have no gluten-containing ingredients could be reduced if there were a special pasta shape such that pasta made in that shape were only ever made with no gluten-containing ingredients (for example, rice and maize).
There is more about the idea itself in the fourth post of the following thread.
http://www.dietaryspecials.co.uk/forum/topic/General-Forum/796/
I wanted to produce an example illustration of a pasta shape in an original shape.
I found that I was able to use the .notdef glyph of the Sonnet to a Renaissance Lady font in the Serif ImpactPlus 5.0 program to produce a virtual three-dimensional shape and then within the ImpactPlus program to extrude the shape to produce a model of an original pasta shape.
An interesting aspect is that I was only able to produce a shape in ImpactPlus from the .notdef glyph of the font because at least one of the printing characters within the basic Microsoft code page 8-bit character set did not have a glyph for it within the font and thus the .notdef glyph was made available for importing.
The shape was then copied and pasted and the copy was moved and rotated.
Along the way there was some experimenting with the view and with the colouring of the shape so as to get a good display.
A two-dimensional view of the two items was exported as a png from ImpactPlus.
The forum where I was posting will not directly accept a graphic file as an attachment to a post. However, it will accept a pdf as an attachment so I was able to use Serif PagePlus X3 to produce a pdf containing the image and then upload the pdf.
Here is a copy of the pdf.
pasta001.pdf (16 KB)
William Overington
9 October 2010