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Re: Font layouts

From:Terrence Donnelly <pag000@...>
Date:Saturday, October 10, 1998, 15:59
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