Fonts

Here are my notes on Fonts.

Browsers display little boxes instead of characters when you don't have your browser set to use international fonts. Question marks take the place of characters displayed with incorrect encoding.

MS Font Properties Extension v2.1

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The "Programmer" monospaced small wide font features sensible looking common coding characters.

Character Sets

The first PC and the first version of the Microsoft operating system only needed a character repertoire of 127 characters derived from 7 bits of 1's and 0's to store written text. Early computer designers, such as those in ASCII (American Society for Computer Information Interchange) assumed an English speaking audience.

U.S. versions of Microsoft Windows up to and including Windows 95 and Windows NT 4 used a character set defined by the ANSI (the American National Standards Institute). The ANSI set had 217 characters out of 256 possible combinations from 8 bits — a single byte). It is also known as "Windows-1252".

The ANSI character set consists of a "Basic Latin" range with values 0-127, and a "Latin-1 Supplement" for characters 160-255.

Apple's proprietary 226-character MacRoman character set uses 95 characters from values 32-126 of the ANSI character set and adds more.

ANSI is a superset of the ISO-8859-1 character set.

To the basic ANSI set Microsoft later added the euro currency symbol and introduced a Pan-European font with its proprietary 16-bit WGL4 (Windows Glyph List 4) character set in different 652 character code pages (with page 1252 being the English ANSI character set).

OEMs (Orginal Equipment Manufacturers) such as IBM made provision for more special characters and languages by replacing the entire code page (identified as 437 in the United States) with a custom code page used by a specific locale.

The large number of characters in Asian languages led to the development of multibyte character sets, in particular the double-byte character set (DBCS). DBCS character handling requires detailed changes in the character-processing algorithms throughout an application's source code.

To make localizing applications easier, an international body defined the Unicode standard using 16 bits to define up to 65,536 characters. Unicode-enabled functions are often referred to as "wide-character" functions.

Using pairs of unicode characters (called "surrogates"), Unicode can support over one million characters.

Version 2.0 of Unicode supports over one million characters by surrogates — pairs of 16-bit unicode characters. The first (high) surrogate is a 16-bit code value in the range U+D800 to U+DBFF. The second (low) surrogate is a 16-bit code value in the range U+DC00 to U+DFFF.

Microsoft began supporting surrogates with Windows 2000 (not 95/98/Me) with cmap 12 OpenType font format and surrogate-enabled IMEs.

Since Windows disables surrogate support by default, two registry values must be set to enable surrogate support:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\LanguagePack] SURROGATE=(REG_DWORD)0x00000002

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\International\Scripts\42] IEFixedFontName=[Surrogate Font Face Name] IEPropFontName=[Surrogate Font Face Name]

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Browser Fonts

According to Alan Wood's notes on web browsers:
• The Arial Unicode MS font aruniupd.exe. Version 0.86. TTF. 13,687.66 KB) includes all the characters in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard. It is no longer available for free download from Microsoft's Typography web site, but as a part of Microsoft products Windows XP, Office 2000, and Publisher.

  The Windows 2000 Character Map does not offer all of the Unicode ranges and thus often can't offer all of the glyphs in a font's repertoire.

  Download fonts only from known reputable sources, because errors in fonts is a known way to crash the ATMFD.DLL CFF (Compact Font Format) font driver or even take over a MSWindows system, simply by clicking on a font icon.

  Microsoft created OpenType fonts after it balked at license fees for Adobe's superior Type 1 Postscript fonts.

• Code2000 (code2000.zip. Version beta 1.13. TTF. Size: 1,218.53 KB) is a shareware Unicode font

• Lucida Sans Unicodea non-profit, scientific educational organization of Christian volunteers (lsansuni.zip, Version 2.00. TTF. Size: 177.16 KB) from Bigelow & Holmes, supplied with a pre-release SDK for Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 in March 1993.

• Bitstream offers its True-Type Cyberbit (cyberbit.zip. Version beta 2.00. TTF. Size: 6,210.58 KB) font

  The 'TITUS Cyberbit Basic' font is a derivative of the Bitstream Cyberbit font developed by TITUS for compliance with Unicode 4.0 (tu30560.zip)

• Palatino Linotype (palab.zip, Version 1.40. TTF. Size: 999.01 KB) is a graceful serif font designed in 1948 by Zapf at Stempel AG

• XSerif Unicode (xsuni.zip, Version 1.00. TTF. Size: 50.59 KB)

• The Summer Institute of Linguistics (a non-profit which prepares Bible translators) has several fonts and other computing resources designed for Unicode, especially Biblical Greek and Hebrew.

Browser Check

To see if your browser dispays international languages:
• James Kass
• Alan Wood

  Font Specs

• TrueType font specifications
• The OpenType Font File

Retrieving font name from within TrueType or OpenType files (.ttf)

• International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) was designed for the study of phonetics, with the intention of being able to describe the sounds of words in any language.
• CJK is Chinese/Japanese/Korean

Font Files

The "OS/2" table of a TrueType 1.0 font file contains information about its typeface weight, superscripts, strikeouts, ascender/descender values, PANOSE classification, licensing info, and more.

Installing Fonts

In Windows, there are two ways to install a font:
1. Copy the .FON file into folder C:\Windows\Fonts, or
2. use the Font icon in the Control Panel.

To make Microsoft Developer Studio recognize a custom font:
In V6, set the font in [Tools Menu][Options][Format Tab][Category]="Source windows" [Font]="Programmer"
In .NET, set the font in [Tools Menu][Options][Environment][Fonts and colors][Text Editor][Font]="Programmer"

Custom Fonts

This page contains JavaScript code from Microsoft's Typography site to detect what browser is being used so that it can replace text instead of the logo defined as glyph M within a special font face mslogo.eot: Microsoft This makes a logo automatically expand and contract with its surrounding text.

End-User-Defined Characters PostScript type 3 format is human-readable Postscript program code for Postscript printers. Metafont, Knuth's font format used in mathematical and linguistic communities, is also a program.

CSS Fonts

CSS tag	English
px	A pixel (picture element) is the distance between one dot and another on a computer screen.
pc	Each pica is 12 points.
pt	Each point is 1/72 inch. On screens with 72 dpi resolution. On screens with 90 dpi resolution.
em	The body size of the font. 1.0 em specifies the full size of the font. 0.5 em specifies 6 of 12 points for a 12 point font.

Java Fonts

Java 2 fonts have a family name, a logical font name, and a face name.

Jave 2 JRE supplied fonts: Dialog (the default), DialogInput, Sans Serif, Serif, Monospaced, and Symbol

Family Name	Logical Category	Face Name	Note
TimesRoman	Serif	TimesRoman Bold
Courier	Monospaced	TimesRoman Bold	Courier Italic

A point is 1/72 of an inch, but the actual size of the font when displayed varies on different machines, depending on the resolution of the screen. The lower the resolution of the screen, the larger the font will display.

Java Font Methods

Java provides the Font class to encapsulate fonts. This wrapper allows interaction with fonts as if they were any other class.

Method	Description
getFamily	Retrieves the font family name as a String
getFontName	Retrieves the font name as a String
getName	Retrieves the logical font name as a String
getSize	Retrieves the font size in points (int value returned)
getStyle	Retrieves style as an int value
isBold	True if font is bold, otherwise it is false
isItalic	True if font is italic, otherwise it is false
isPlain	True if font is plain, otherwise it is false

Handling Fonts

For an array of strings listing what fonts are available on the client system, use a characteristic of the GraphicsEnvironment class:
getAvailableFontFamilyNames,

To create an instance of the Font class:

new Font ( String fontName, int fontStyle, int fontPointSize);