mcglk@scott.stat.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen) (09/24/88)
Being one of the few people that actually uses native PostScript around here gets me in trouble on occasion. This is one of those times. I've been asked if I would find a way to replace four characters--the yen sign (0xA5), the florins sign (0xA6), the section sign (0xA7), and the "splat" sign (0xA8)--with the upper- and lowercase thorn, and the upper- and lowercase yogh, respectively. (These are generally used in Old English texts, and look vaguely like "P"s, incidentally.) My problem is that I'm quite used to drawing figures, but haven't a clue as to go about working on fonts. I assume lineto and curveto operators would be on the slow side, but I don't know how else to go about it. Plus I haven't the faintest idea how to tell PostScript to use my routine instead of the yen-sign routine when it hits a 0xA5 code. Could someone out there get me started? Of course, if there's a thorn and yogh set out there, that would be delightful. But if not, I need some serious help. . . . Thanks. . . . --Ken McGlothlen mcglk@scott.biostat.washington.edu mcglk@max.acs.washington.edu mcglk@max.bitnet
dns@sq.uucp (David Slocombe) (09/28/88)
mcglk@scott.biostat.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen) writes in comp.lang.postscript and comp.fonts: > I've been asked if I would find a way to replace four characters ... > with the upper- and lowercase thorn, and the > upper- and lowercase yogh, respectively. > ... Of course, if there's a thorn and yogh set out there, > that would be delightful. Old English needs the following special characters: eth lower-case (like an "d" with a curved ascender and a line through it) Eth Upper-case (like a "D" with a line through the vertical part) thorn lower-case (like a "p" superimposed on a "b", sort of) Thorn Upper-case (a different version of the lower-case thorn) wynn lower-case (like a "p" but different) Wynn Upper-case (like a "P" but different) yogh lower-case (like a flat-topped "3" dropped down below baseline) Yogh Upper-case (like a flat-topped "3" NOT dropped down) The symbol for "and" (looks like a "7" dropped down) A punctuation mark that looks like an upside-down, mirror-image ";" Now it happens that the subset {eth, Eth, thorn, Thorn} is also used in modern Icelandic, and when Adobe decided to upgrade their fonts to support European languages, these characters got added along with accented characters. However they do not have assigned values in the "encoding vector": you have to do that yourself. And of course you have to add the appropriate font-metrics to whatever tables your text-formatter uses. I know for a fact that Adobe's latest ROMs (Rev. 42.0) for the Apple LaserWriter have these four symbols in Roman, Italic, and Bold (at least) for Times and Helvetica. As far as we can tell, these same ROMs don't contain these symbols for Palatino. Perhaps Adobe can explain. (The currently-shipped Garamond downloadable fonts for PostScript also have them. Perhaps many others too.) The other symbols (the subset {wynn, Wynn, yogh, Yogh,"and","upside-down-;"}) have to be created and downloaded to the PostScript printer. And their font-metrics have to be added to your formatter's tables. We at SoftQuad have created these latter characters for downloading to PostScript printers, in Times and Helvetica, and in Roman, Italic, and Bold styles. We have a file which downloads these 36 glyphs and fixes the encoding vector for the 24 ROM-based glyphs. We could probably turn them into bitmap fonts for the HP LaserJet too, although we haven't actually tried that. We invite inquiries from Old English users. Followup postings (if any) to comp.text, please. ---------------------------------------------------------------- David Slocombe (416) 963-8337 Vice-President, Research & Development (800) 387-2777 (from U.S. only) SoftQuad Inc. uucp: {uunet!attcan!utzoo, utai}!sq!dns 720 Spadina Ave. Internet: dns@sq.com Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2T9