Windows XP Private Character Editor

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Bhikkhu Pesala
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Windows XP Private Character Editor

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Has anyone ever used the Windows XP/2000 Private Character Editor?

To run it, Press the Windows Key + R and enter eudcedit in the run dialogue. I wonder if this would be useful to add to FontCreator's launch externals program list?

It is a bitmap editor, but the characters it creates are scalable. You assign them to the Private Use Area, and can paste them into Wordpad and Serif Page Plus. It doesn't matter what font is selected if you link the characters to all fonts, or you can link characters to individual fonts.

Opera users can get a custom button to launch it from their browser.
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William
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Post by William »

> Has anyone ever used the Windows XP/2000 Private Character Editor?

I was unaware of this until just reading your post. I have just tried it using Windows XP. Thank you for posting this information.

First of all I tried Private Character Editor with U+E011. I chose that rather than U+E000 as U+E011 is a more general test: I have experienced problems with some Private Use Area characters which end in 00 on an old Windows 98 machine.

I then used Microsoft Calculator to find that the decimal equivalent of E011 hexadecimal is 57361 and I tried using Alt 57361 with Arial in WordPad. The display was produced.

I then used the Private Character Editor with U+E707 and tried that as Alt 59143 using my 10000 font in WordPad, which has a ct ligature glyph within it at U+E707. The 10000 ct ligature glyph was displayed. I tried with Arial and the Private Character Editor glyph was displayed. Trying with my Quest text font produced the Quest text ct ligature glyph.

So it appears that a glyph produced using Private Character Editor only displays if the font being used does not include a glyph for the particular codepoint. I checked that 10000 and Quest text display the U+E011 glyph.

In effect, it appears that the glyph from the Private Character Editor replaces the .notdef glyph if the .notdef glyph would otherwise appear.

William Overington

2 April 2007
Joop Jagers
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Post by Joop Jagers »

In the sit you mention you wrote: "The private characters will be visible only on your PC." From this I conclude that the eudcedit data are stored somewhere in the registry. Is this correct? If so, is it possible to identify the proper part of the registry and export this part? This might be useful if you want to share your new private use characters.
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Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Joop Jagers wrote:From this I conclude that the eudcedit data are stored somewhere in the registry. Is this correct?
I don't know. It could be stored as a file on disk too. None of the various sites I looked at went as far as explaining where the data was stored. This Site was the best I found.
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Post by Erwin Denissen »

Look for *.TTE in Windows font folder. The "Link with All Fonts" file is EUDC.TTE. Since this font is not installed or loaded on my system, it didn't show up in the active font list of MainType. Browsing the Windows fonts folder revealed it, the font name is EUDC. You can open the font file with FontCreator and modify it if you wish. Each pixel represents 32x32 units.

For some unknown reason the font does show up in Windows Character Map, named All Fonts (Private Characters).
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Post by Erwin Denissen »

I just found this registry entry for "Link with All Fonts":

Code: Select all

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\EUDC\1252]
SystemDefaultEUDCFont = C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\EUDC.TTE
When you link to selected fonts you'll see something like this:

Code: Select all

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\EUDC\1252]
Bodoni MT Black = C:\WINDOWS\FONTS\MyFile.TTE
In Windows Character Map, the font name is Bodoni MT Black (Private Characters). Again the font is not active, makes me wonder who invented this hack...

Although 6400 character to glyph index mappings exist (the full Private Use Area), Windows Character Map will only show non-empty characters.
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