root@apollo.COM (root) (02/24/89)
Does anyone have any information about using a font encoding vector that use glphs from different character sets? In other words if you look at Reencodesmall in the cookbook, the encoding vector has glyphs from the standard set like /Oacute, /aring, etc. At first I I simply added characters from the symbol set (/degree, /copyrightserif) to the vector. When text was rendered, all indices in the vector that contained symbol characters printed a blank on the page. What does Adobe intend to do about >8 bit character sets. According to the documentation, only the 256 entries in the encoding vector can be used. Does this imply that the user would have to implement a "font swapping" function to handle symbols outside of the resident encoding vector? Any help would be greatly appreciated... Tim Hayes Apollo Computer ---------------
greid@adobe.com (Glenn Reid) (02/24/89)
In article <41a5ec5d.1830f@apollo.COM> root@apollo.COM (root) writes: >Does anyone have any information about using a font encoding vector >that use glphs from different character sets? In other words if >you look at Reencodesmall in the cookbook, the encoding vector has >glyphs from the standard set like /Oacute, /aring, etc. At first I >I simply added characters from the symbol set (/degree, /copyrightserif) >to the vector. When text was rendered, all indices in the vector >that contained symbol characters printed a blank on the page. > >What does Adobe intend to do about >8 bit character sets. According >to the documentation, only the 256 entries in the encoding vector >can be used. Does this imply that the user would have to implement >a "font swapping" function to handle symbols outside of the resident >encoding vector? The Adobe font mechanism has been greatly extended to handle arbitrary encoding of any number of characters from any number of fonts. We call it the "composite font" mechanism. It was invented for supporting Kanji typefaces (over 7,000 characters), but it can be used in many ways, including >8 bit character sets, mixing characaters from different fonts, etc. Currently this mechanism is a language extension that is built into only Kanji PostScript printers (like Apple's Kanji LaserWriter II NTX and DEC's KPS-40). It may be available in more printers eventually. There is a [new] document describing this mechanism available from our file server. You can retrieve it by send a message containing "send Documents compositefonts.ps" to "adobe!ps-file-server". It's not so easy to do in the existing PostScript language. You can sort of mix characters from various fonts by declaring a user-defined font which does the appropriate "findfont scalefont setfont show" within the BuildChar procedure. I believe there was a message on this technique in this newsgroup not long ago. >8 bit character sets are much harder to implement, and it boils down to simply changing fonts. I hope this helps. Glenn Reid Adobe Systems PostScript Developer Tools & Strategies