Missing info from Windows Charmap?

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AdamLink
Posts: 6
Joined: Sat Jun 07, 2014 2:02 am

Missing info from Windows Charmap?

Post by AdamLink »

I am wondering if I am doing something wrong when I create some of the characters on my font. Once I have installed a created font in my Windows 8.1 system, and look at it in the Windows charmap, some of the characters show the proper Keystroke listing in the bottom right of the charmap that matches the number that shows in Font Creator. An example of this is in the first attachment, called showing.jpg, where you can see Keystroke: Alt+0187 on the right picture matching the 187 on the left picture.

Some of the characters, however, do not show the Keystroke listing in the charmap. Take alook at my second attachment, missing.jpg, and you can see that on the left image, it clearly shows the number 90, but there is no Keystroke listing on the right image.

The missing Keystroke info is on about half of my characters, some early in the font, some much later.

Is there anything I need to do in Font Creator so the missing info shows up in the Windows charmap for each glyph?

Zane
Attachments
missing keystroke info
missing keystroke info
missing.JPG (76.77 KiB) Viewed 7681 times
with the Keystroke info
with the Keystroke info
showing.jpg (65.36 KiB) Viewed 7681 times
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Missing info from Windows Charmap?

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

The Alt Keystroke is missing for characters that you can type directly with the keyboard. To type the Z character you just press the capital Z key (Shift z).

The Alt Keystroke number is shown for those characters that cannot be typed with the keyboard in the usual way, but only if Alt + nnn will work. For other characters beyond Alt 0256, no keystroke is shown.

Use a better character map utility. Babel Map is free and has extensive features for sorting and finding characters. Large numbers of characters can be copied to the clipboard at once for pasting into other Windows Applications.
Copy to Clipboard.png
Copy to Clipboard.png (73.61 KiB) Viewed 7675 times
Or, if you have MainType, that can also be used to send any character to the background application.

I have moved your thread to the appropriate forum as it's not about FontCreator. There's nothing that can be done in FontCreator to alter the way that Windows Character Map is designed.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
AdamLink
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Joined: Sat Jun 07, 2014 2:02 am

Re: Missing info from Windows Charmap?

Post by AdamLink »

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:The Alt Keystroke is missing for characters that you can type directly with the keyboard. To type the Z character you just press the capital Z key (Shift z).

The Alt Keystroke number is shown for those characters that cannot be typed with the keyboard in the usual way, but only if Alt + nnn will work. For other characters beyond Alt 0256, no keystroke is shown.
Thank you for your reply, and for moving this to the correct area. I just want to make sure I am understanding this.
I have characters that I can type in Word all the way up to Alt + 365. The Alt + works on each one of these to produce the character in a document.
If I understand you correctly, anything after Alt + 256 will not show a Keystroke listing in the charmap. Is that correct?
I will look into Babel Map, thank you. But in the meantime, is there any way in charmap to show the number of the character?

Zane
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Missing info from Windows Charmap?

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

AdamLink wrote:If I understand you correctly, anything after Alt + 256 will not show a Keystroke listing in the charmap. Is that correct? I will look into Babel Map, thank you. But in the meantime, is there any way in charmap to show the number of the character?
That's correct. Unless Character Map has been improved since Windows 7, I don't know of any way to show the Alt Key numbers for characters about 0255. They might work in Word, but they don't work in other Windows Apps, which is probably why they are not shown in Character Map. It would be frustrating for users to display shortcuts that did not usually work.

In Wordpad I can use Alt + 7746, 7747 to type Ṃ, ṃ but that won't work in Notepad, nor in my Opera browser.

Alt 164, 165 work to type ñ, Ñ respectively — that's how Windows works. These are ASCII codes from the days of Windows 3.1 and MS DOS. The ANSI codes are 0209 and 0241 for Ñ, ñ.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
AdamLink
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Re: Missing info from Windows Charmap?

Post by AdamLink »

Got it, thank you.
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