Re: A Font for Pictographs

I can tell you the technical reason why. The fonts that behave this
way -- map special characters to regular keystrokes on Windows but map
nothing to regular keystrokes on Mac -- are encoded using something
called the Windows symbol encoding. The actual characters themselves
are not at U+0020 - U+007F like you expect them to be, but at U+F020 -
U+F07F, in the Private Use Area. When Windows sees a font with Windows
symbol encoding, it remaps regular ASCII characters to the PUA. When
Mac OS X sees a font with Windows symbol encoding, it does no such
remapping, so you just get regular characters.

The fault lies with Microsoft, who created the Windows symbol encoding
in the first place and gave their OS nonstandard behavior WRT Unicode.
:)

Less of a fault lies with the font maker, who didn't realize that
selecting "use symbol encoding" or "font is a symbol font" or whatever
the option is called in their font editor would result in such wacky
behavior.

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 1:35 AM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Oh, I can tell you why--and let me tell you, when the change
> occurred, I was NOT happy.


--
Hasta la pasta,
Rebecca Bettencourt.
------------------------------------------------------------
I tried the real world once; didn't really care for it.

"I could counter with the fact that a disproportionate number of TG
women I know are computer programmers. ::grin:: In fact, there's a
joke going around that says exposure to computer screens causes
transsexuality." -- Kate Bornstein

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