symbol or unicode?

luserlarry · Post by **luserlarry** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 4:13 pm

I am making a new language, and this program is helping out a lot. I was wondering what the differace is and which would be bettr for me. My language has a completely new letter system, containing 35 characters. 7 of which being thje vowels. In my language the vowels act like accents. Someone has already helped me out ont hat part, but I was wanting to know which format is the best for my language's font.

Yehuda · Post by **Yehuda** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 5:28 pm

Since the characters are presumably ones without a Unicode mapping, you shouldn't call it Unicode

. Generally, for this kind of a font a Symbol encoding is used. This is true even for character sets that do have Unicode values, but for which a non-standard encoding is being used.

Yehuda N. Falk
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Jerusalm, Israel

luserlarry · Post by **luserlarry** » Thu Feb 27, 2003 7:00 pm

ok what do you mean by encoded? Cuz I just started a black font and chose symbol, would anything happen if i chose unicode instead?

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 6:46 am

Symbol fonts are not intended for text that wraps in paragraphs. If your new language is to be used for normal text, use the Unicode template and map your letters to the normal letters a-z. If you have seven vowels you can map five to aeiou, one to y and one to a symbol such as # and ~ which will give you the option for Uppercase if you decide to add that later.

In the Unicode system some symbols like “Quotation Marks” and em-dash are mapped to higher numbers, as Unicode has lots of character sets including Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, General Punctuation, and Mathematical Symbols. Open Times New Roman or Arial fonts to see how the characters are mapped.

luserlarry · Post by **luserlarry** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 1:20 pm

OK thanx for all of the help. I figured out that for the basics, including all of the puctuation, would be 97 glyphs. I already started a symbol font, is there a way to change it with out starting over? That would be alright, but I would rather just change it over.

Again thank you for all of your help.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 2:34 pm

From the Help File

When a font has a Microsoft Unicode platform, the font is a normal font.
When a font has a Microsoft Symbol platform, the font is a Symbol font.

Symbol character sets have a special meaning: all of the characters in the Unicode range 0xF000 - 0xF0FF (inclusive) will be used to enumerate the symbol character set. All glyphs in this range are mapped to the range 0x0000 - 0x00FF.

Symbol fonts do not form words so line breaks can occur after any character code. A spell checker should not check symbol font-formatted material.

In order to change a symbol font into a normal font there are a few things:

· Make sure the Microsoft platform is "Microsoft Unicode".

From the Platform Manager command (Format menu) select the Microsoft platform. Now press the change button. The platform should be changed from "Microsoft Symbol" to "Microsoft Unicode".

· In the Settings command (Format menu) on the Classification tab set the Panose - Family Kind from "Pictorial" to something appropriate and the Font-family - Class from "Symbolic" to something that suits the fonts style.
· In the Settings command (Format menu) on the Ranges tab change the Code Page Character Ranges (if available is checked). Unselect "Symbol Character Set" and select the appropriate ranges.

© 1997-2002 High-Logic The Netherlands

luserlarry · Post by **luserlarry** » Fri Feb 28, 2003 6:59 pm

thank you, I think I am up to speed now.

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