WGL4 and Box Drawing -- seriously?
Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 3:29 pm
Hey there.
I've been plugging away at a font here for the last few months (off and on, whenever the enthusiasm strikes me) on an old blackletter font, based on an original 16th century font. It's been a lot of fun! The original font -- that is, the original text that I scanned -- only had the most basic characters, I was able to glean an entire lowercase set and most of the uppercase, but had to "invent" a few of the latter on my own to complete the set. And no numbers at all! I had to create those on my own, too.
And then I got really ambitious, and created complete Greek/Coptic and Cyrillic character sets, along with various math, etc. symbols and stuff.
And having reached that point, I figured what the heck, why not go all the way and make it WGL4-compliant? And so that's what I'm now trying to do, but I'm rather mystified about one thing -- the various box drawing glyphs. It's not that they'd be hard to do, but why on earth are they "required" glyphs for the WGL4 specs? I know word processing programs generally have the ability to draw boxes around text and stuff -- is that what those glyphs are used for? I had always just assumed that those programs just created them "on the fly," kinda thing (more like a graphics program would).
I guess I have no choice in creating them, if I want my font to be WGL4-compliant, but it just seems so weird -- are they really necessary? From the links I've found about WGL4-compliance, it does seem that they are, but I'm wondering if perhaps I'm misinterpreting those specs.
Thanks in advance!
I've been plugging away at a font here for the last few months (off and on, whenever the enthusiasm strikes me) on an old blackletter font, based on an original 16th century font. It's been a lot of fun! The original font -- that is, the original text that I scanned -- only had the most basic characters, I was able to glean an entire lowercase set and most of the uppercase, but had to "invent" a few of the latter on my own to complete the set. And no numbers at all! I had to create those on my own, too.
And then I got really ambitious, and created complete Greek/Coptic and Cyrillic character sets, along with various math, etc. symbols and stuff.
And having reached that point, I figured what the heck, why not go all the way and make it WGL4-compliant? And so that's what I'm now trying to do, but I'm rather mystified about one thing -- the various box drawing glyphs. It's not that they'd be hard to do, but why on earth are they "required" glyphs for the WGL4 specs? I know word processing programs generally have the ability to draw boxes around text and stuff -- is that what those glyphs are used for? I had always just assumed that those programs just created them "on the fly," kinda thing (more like a graphics program would).
I guess I have no choice in creating them, if I want my font to be WGL4-compliant, but it just seems so weird -- are they really necessary? From the links I've found about WGL4-compliance, it does seem that they are, but I'm wondering if perhaps I'm misinterpreting those specs.
Thanks in advance!