Alt+???? help me map

Louisa Swaden · Post by **Louisa Swaden** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 2:18 pm

I have been trying to paste new glyphs into existing mappings for other characters (ones I don't want) only to find that due to (I think) hinting data not coming over the type doesn't display properly in font preview or in the word document after installation. It's weird, it just jumps about depending on what view I have my monitor set to. It also prints wrong.
Anyway, if the problem is that I should not be using a wrong character map then perhaps I should set up the glyphs under Private Use. But how do I use the Alt+0+???? keypad? I tried putting in a new character at decimal mapping 57344 but when I type Alt+0+57344 it doesn't work! I would really appreciate it if anyone can help me.

Bhikkhu Pesala · Post by **Bhikkhu Pesala** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 3:34 pm

What kind of font are you creating? The private use area is only intended for characters that don't have code points defined in the Unicode System. Follow the link for the full details http://www.unicode.org/

If you are creating a normal text font, use the usual character positions so that you can type with the normal keyboard. Only if you are creating pictograms do you need to use a symbol font template, as symbols fonts are not intended to word-wrap like normal text.

You will lose hinting information by pasting glyphs from one font to another, but this shouldn't make the characters jump about at different zoom levels. Are the glyphs correctly positioned on the base-line, and within the character cell? Lack of hinting will only make the fonts look ragged at small sizes, and then only if font-smoothing is turned off. When printed on high resolution printers, it makes little difference.

I can have a look at the font for you if you email it to me, but I make no promises I can fix the problem. I am also just learning to use the program since October.

PS. You could now delete your same question from the other thread.

Yehuda · Post by **Yehuda** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 5:30 pm

If you do want to make the font a symbol font (one with the characters mapped to the Private Use Area), you need to map them in such a way that Windows can use them. This includes using the Alt-number keystroke to access the characters.

The Alt-number keystroke only works with character codes up to and including 255: 0 to 255 are the codes available for one-byte character codes, which is the pre-Unicode standard. (Since 0-31 are control codes, it's really 32 to 255; and 32 is usually a space, so it's really 33 to 255.) Non-Unicode programs and OSs can only see characters with those codes in a font. There are different mappings between Unicode and one-byte codes for different languages.

For the private use area, the one-byte code is determined by subtracting 61440 (hex F000) from the encoding in the font. For example, in the Windows Symbol font, the "for all" symbol (upside-down A) has a mapping of 61474 (hex F022). To use Alt-number to insert this character, you would type in Alt-0034, because 61474-61440=34 (hex 0022). (In fact, you can use the " key to get the character, since " is character 34.)

Hope this helps.