Re: Font layouts

On Wed, 7 Oct 1998 15:36:55 -0500 Terrence Donnelly
<pag000@...> writes:

>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:

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. 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.

This is like what Shaul was taking about with Arabic word processors,
where if, for instance, the character you're typing is preceded by a
space, it will put in the initial form; if it's preceded by a character
and followed by a space or mark of punctuation, it puts in the final
form; and if it's preceded and followed by a character it puts in the
medial form. 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.

----------
Josh Brandt-Young <neonwave7@...>
http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6073/
"After the tempest, I behold, once more, the weasel."
(Mispronunciation of Ancient Greek)

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