From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 06:46:48 EST
Thomas Lotze asked.
>Why below 255?
I don't know for certain but I suspect that it is that font designers do
this so that people can use an application such as Microsoft Paint to
produce an illustration using the font. In the absence of regular Unicode
code points for the ligatures, a font designer has either to use the Private
Use Area and be Unicode compatible or make a non-Unicode compatible font, if
the font designer wishes people to be able to have direct access to the
ligature characters.
There is an interesting experiment which one can try if one wishes.
At the http://www.waldenfont.com website there are various Fraktur fonts for
sale. There is a bundle of sample fonts available for download which have
only some of the letters and ligatures in the fonts. The Gutenberg font has
the ppe ligature within it and indeed a number of other ligatures and
abbreviations and, in fact, a complete set of ten digit characters.
There is the manual gbpmanual.pdf available for download as well. On page
14 of that document the ppe ligature is listed as being at 0171.
If on a PC one installs the sample Gutenberg font and then starts the
Microsoft Paint program and draws some text, selecting the Gutenberg font,
if one holds down the Alt key and keys 0171 using the digit keys at the far
right of the keyboard, hopefully the ppe ligature in the Gutenberg font will
appear on the screen.
In fact Paint only allows text up to 72 point. However, if one uses
WordPad, then one can make the text something like 200 point in size if one
wishes and use the Print Screen facility to copy the display image onto the
clipboard. On can then paste the image from the clipboard into Paint so
that one then has a 200 point Gutenberg ppe ligature in the Paint program.
There are some articles about using WordPad and Paint to produce graphic
effects with large characters and gold textures and so on in our family
webspace, together with the gold texture file and some other texture files
too.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo
William Overington
4 November 2002
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 04 2002 - 07:24:24 EST