For the most part, though, our letters are unadorned. We occasionally see them on words of foreign origin, such as the acute accent ´ on the é of café or the cedilla ¸ on the ç of façade. In rare cases (mostly archaic), the diaresis ¨ appears on English words like coöperate. In English, we rarely use diacritical marks. I haven’t got a reply yet but I am hoping people are just still busy at work. Here’s the meat of the email I sent this morning to the FontForge Users mailing list (yes, a mailing list apparently this is 1998), describing the problem. (Like Windows Movie Maker, FontForge has you work on a “project” that is saved in its own native file format generating a final video file or font file, respectively, is the last step of the project.) This was to be, of course, a “rough draft” of the final font, intended for use in kerning. I generated an OpenType font file from my FontForge project. (For the most part, I can either do what I need to do just using Windows Notepad… or I need more control than any word processor can provide, and jump right into Scribus, an advanced desktop publishing application.) I even downloaded Open Office, which I used a lot on my old laptop before I started using Google Docs for my occasional word processing needs. At this stage, it really needs to be looked at as a large block of text in a word processor. In FontForge, I can only work on a single line of text at a time. (That’s 1378 pairs.) I even kerned combinations that will probably never be used, like qm and kB. Oh, how I have kerning woes.Īll letter pairs have been kerned, for all 52 letters. There is also a glyph (U+1F381) for a wrapped present, which is how I was able to see this lovely note in my spam folder: There’s another block for “Transportation and Map Symbols,” as well as the three mysteriously-named blocks “Miscellaneous Symbols,” “Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs,” and “Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs.” With these glyphs, the world’s need is fulfilled for symbols of beer mugs, pig noses, Dromedary camels (with the helpful note “has a single hump”), hot dogs, tacos, baby angels, and alien monsters. For some reason, may of them have cat ears, because of course they do. The next block is “Emoticons,” which in the Unicode platonic ideal, consists of actual smiley faces, not emoticons built out of punctuation marks. But this was not enough for Unicode oh, no. These are pretty standard-looking typographical symbols, such as numerals inside circles, arrows, stars, and hearts. The first block of Unicode dingbats (U+2700–U+27BF) consists mainly of glyphs from ITC Zapf Dingbats, an early dingbat font. With a universal character encoding system, why relegate dingbats only to specialty fonts that confound anyone exploring their word processor’s Fonts menu for the first time? Any font can now have a full complement of dingbats! (Whoever drew the cat glpyh in Webdings, however, should really bone up on what cats actually look like.) Some fonts consist entirely of dingbats, such as Wingdings and Webdings. With the advent of digital fonts, there has been an explosion of dingbats.
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