Yesterday there was a post to the Unicode mailing list about various designs of stars.
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... /0008.html
The thread can be followed from the following web page.
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicod ... index.html
This morning I decided to try to make a font that would include four glyphs for stars.
I found two of the desired stars in regular Unicode.
U+2605 BLACK STAR
U+2606 WHITE STAR
I added the other two glyphs into the plane 0 Private Use Area, choosing the mappings myself.
U+E957 BLACK AND WHITE STAR
U+E958 WHITE AND BLACK STAR
I chose the two Private Use Area mappings so that the Alt codes were in sequence as regards their last four digits, thinking that this might be helpful to people using the font with WordPad.
Characters and Alt codes.
★ 9733
☆ 9734
59735
59736
Here is the font.
Making the font was an interesting experience as I used copy and paste to gather glyphs from two of my existing fonts and I then used the Glyph Transformer of FontCreator to make the white star from a copy of a glyph that I had copied from one of my existing fonts.
From one font I gathered the letters, figures and points.
From another font I gathered the black star.
The process of producing the white star from a copy of the black star is interesting.
I checked the width of the lines in the text letters.
It is 128 font units.
So, wishing to make a white star from a black star, with lines of 128 font units wide, whilst keeping the star the same size, located at the same place within the cell, and with the same advance width for the glyph, I then used the Glyph Transformer to produce the following two operations in sequence.
Thin(64, 64) without preserving the side bearings
Hollow(128, 128) without preserving the side bearings
It is as straightforward as that.
The Glyph Transformer does all of the mathematics.
I calculated the Ranges as well.
William Overington
7 November 2012