Re: A Font for Pictographs

--- On Sat, 12/13/08, Jeffrey Jones <jsjonesmiami@...> wrote:

>
> Nice idea! I tried it out. Unfortunately, IE6 has trouble
> displaying the
> assembled pictures at the bottom: it looks like there's
> an extra shift to the
> right with each character. However, the first 9bgB comes
> out OK except for
> being cut off a little on the right. Firedfox had no
> trouble except for the cut
> off. Opera completely refuses to use the font.
>
> Jeff
That's interesting. I never thought to try it out with different browsers. I assumed
that a font is a font. It works fine with MS Word.

>
> I was playing around with it and I noticed a couple things:
>
> 1. In addition to space - + and _, the following characters
> advance:
> ~ ( ) O } A J Z C B ? z /
> I'm pretty sure that some aren't supposed to.
>
> 2. There seem to be several redundant characters, e.g. j =
> ih (= hi).
>
> Jeff
I will have to double check each character. My original idea was to have all
lower case characters NOT advance the cursor, and all upper case one DO advance
the cursor, so that four keystroke would suffice for a character. That didn't
quite work out, however.

Also, I think I need to adjust the advance characters, and maybe exchange hyphen for
space bar, and adjust the other spacings so that space bar always puts the
proper distance between pictographs.

As for the redundant characters, I wanted to save on keystrokes, so I tried to
provide "shortcuts" for more common shapes. For example, you can draw a diamond
with four keystrokes (KLMN) or with a single keystroke (zero). The zero key is
just the shortcut way to draw a diamond, so that character definitions would
not get too long.

--gary

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