Re: Font layouts

At 03:54 PM 10/8/98 -0700, Josh Brandt-Young wrote:
>On Wed, 7 Oct 1998 15:36:55 -0500 Terrence Donnelly
>>I'm in the process of making a TrueType font which has more characters
>>than can be accessed from a standard keyboard, and I'm wondering about
>>the most
>>logical way to proceed.
>
>[snip]
>
>First question: in total, how many different characters does your writing
>system have? Unless that number is above 215, you shouldn't really have
>to worry about mapping at all. See below:
>
I never actually counted them; but there are 4 groups of symbols, and each
group uses almost all the keys on the keyboard, so there are a lot.

>My suggestion is that you just put all your characters into the font (of
>course, you can't go above 255, and there are certain values that don't
>work, but you probably know that) without concerning yourself about where
>they are. Making a *font* that does what you're talking about (I mean
>CTRL-ALT-SHIFT, etc.) is actually impossible AFAIK, because codes like
>that govern programs and not fonts.
As I think others have pointed out, this is really a function of
your program.  When I set my Windows keyboard to US-International
(thanks, Steg!), I can produce CTRL-ALT and SHIFT-CTRL-ALT characters
at will.  It's true that in some programs, these key combos can be used
for program control, but there's almost always an alternative work-around.

 But the fact is that you really don't
>need to do any of that. As I said, just get all your glyphs into the
>font, then write (or have someone write) a keyboard program that will use
>the proper forms of each letter at the proper time.
>
[...]
> It really wouldn't be that hard to program--if you gave me
>detailed specifications, I could probably do it in an hour or two.
>
>If this is what you're looking for, let me know and I'll see what I can
>do.
>
Thanks for the offer, but I don't want to go the software route.  The user
will just have to do the conversions themselves.

So I'm going to go with a single font, in which you can get the various
forms of a letter by hitting the unshifted, shifted, CTRL-ALT and
SHIFT-CTRL-ALT versions of its key.  You'll always be able to use the
ALT-0### method to get at the codes above 128, if you prefer.

BTW, I realized that if you use all the codes above 032 and make a font
family with Plain, Bold, Italic and Bold-Italic members, you could
potentially access 888 different characters with relative ease.  As I keep
telling my wife, there must be _something_ I can do with this
information!

-- Terry

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711