Question:
How do I make the space character in my font contain a glyph but only display that character on screen in MS Word 2003 when ‘Show/Hide’ is switched on?
Background:
Microsoft Word can display on screen non-printable characters such as a space (a dot vertically in the centre of the line), a carriage return (back to front looking capital ‘P’) etc.
I wish to use the same glyphs/characters as used in Arial.
I’ve found the carriage return ($00B6 - postscript name) and copied and pasted the glyph (resized it) and it works well.
I’ve tried the same with the space character ($0020 and/or $00A0 - postscript names) but this has an undesired effect. The space character should be blank when viewed on screen (just like when you type in a regular font, like I’m doing here, for example) but when I turn on ‘Show/Hide’ in Word (Tools > Options… > View tab > Formatting marks section > and tick All) I want to the see the non-printable glyph (vertically aligned dot) in the line.
Glyph $00A0 is the non-breaking space — a fixed width space used to keep words together on the same line. It is often inserted by pressing control + space bar in wordprocessors. That is not the non-printing space character you want, which I think is the middle dot or period centre: $00B7.
Well, I only have Word 97, but my understanding, not formally learned anywhere, is that one uses U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT in the font and that one does not alter the glyphs of the space characters. Then Word dynamically makes an on-the-fly substitution in the display engine and uses U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT glyph instead of a space glyph. This character appears to have the PostScript name periodcentered with the American English spelling of the word centre.
I have just made a test font, by deleting two identical looking glyphs from a copy of a font made using Scanahand and changing the name of the font and the file name, and it seems that it is U+00B7 that one needs, at least in Word 97, so maybe it worth testing whether it is still the same in Word 2003.
