Msg: Re: Upper ASCII characters in XyWrite under vDosXy

Martin,

FontForge is what I used. Be warned, however: I know absolutely nothing about font design or editing, so suggestions here are necessarily tentative.

The symbols may actually be in the font you're already using, but their location apparently makes them inaccessible to xywrite. In some cases, it's just a matter of copying the desired symbol (either from another font or within the font itself) to the correct ascii location where you'd normally expect it (by numerical value). In other cases, I remember that I located the box drawing symbol section of the font (it's labelled as such, just keep scrolling down) and replaced a given box symbol (whose ascii value I knew) with the symbol I actually wanted (having no need of the box stuff). So, for example, I located the box symbol which corresponded to ascii 184 and replaced it with the copyright symbol -- but that slot wasn't actually labelled as 184. But alt+shift+184 produced it on screen. Attempts to add that symbol elsewhere didn't work.

I know -- confusing and haphazard. And with the latest version of vDosxy, released today, one of my modified screen fonts no longer works (others do), so there are a number of other unanswered questions. But in the end, it was successful. The good news is, I'm sure somebody here can give a coherent and reliable account of basic font editing, which I can't.

From: Martin J. Osborne
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2015 3:32 PM
Subject: Re: Upper ASCII characters in XyWrite under vDosXy

Hi John.

I don't *think* my problem has to do with the font missing the symbols.
But I'm interested in how you created your custom font. I have a .fon
file that has all the symbols I need, but I haven't been able to convert
it to ttf format. So I thought of taking a ttf font and editing it.
What tools did you use? I have found FontForge, which seems to have
many features, but I don't yet understand how the characters it reports
at the various positions correspond to the ones I see in a XyWrite file.

Martin

On 24.04.2015 01:43, John Paines (Redacted sender mailto:vf200@xxxxxxxx for
DMARC) wrote:
> I hesitate to offer advice, since my own solution to missing symbols --
> including some needed to display xywrite formatting correctly -- was to
> haphazardly edit my chosen display font with a freeware editor, and copy
> in the symbols I needed from a font which had them. The fonts in
> question were both open license.
>
> I didn't know what I was doing, but the edited font displays the symbols
> and prints correctly as well. In this case, I added box drawing
> symbols, an "em" dash and a copyright symbol, along with formatting
> symbols xy3 uses. I would think any symbol could be added in this way,
> as long as it's mapped below 255.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Martin J. Osborne mailto:osborne@xxxxxxxx
> *To:* xywrite@xxxxxxxx
> *Sent:* Thursday, April 23, 2015 3:30 PM
> *Subject:* Upper ASCII characters in XyWrite under vDosXy
>
>
> I've run into a variant of a problem I've had before with upper ASCII
> characters in XyWrite. Instead of the characters displaying, I see
> their ASCII numbers in square brackets. For example, instead of an
> alpha, I see [294].
>
> I understand that the problem has to do with the code page. I think I
> need code page 437. (My settings file says
> df la 437
> which seems to be correct.) In the past I have encountered the problem
> on some, but not all, hardware, and have solved it by following the
> instructions at
> http://www.xywrite.com/ttg/appnotes/app111.txt
> But those instructions clearly don't apply to vDosXy. Is there any way
> of solving the problem in vDosXy?
>
> Thanks
> Martin
>
> --
> Martin J. Osborne
> http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne
>
> Theoretical Economics, a journal of the Econometric Society
> http://econtheory.org/http://econtheory.org
> Follow TE: http://twitter.com/EconTheory

>
>
>

--
Martin J. Osborne
http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/osborne

Theoretical Economics, a journal of the Econometric Society
http://econtheory.org/http://econtheory.org
Follow TE: http://twitter.com/EconTheory