Re: No TrueType 141?

[Wolfgang Bechstein wolfie@xxxxxxxx]

It seems like Peter Evans still hasn't got a satisfactory answer to
his--in my opinion eminently sensible and not that hard to grasp--query
about how to enter certain ANSI characters in XyWin. I'm afraid I won't
be able to provide a definite answer either, but I would just like to
offer some corroboration of what his problem is. I am surprised (or maybe
not) that noone from TTG has offered any advice. Robert Holmgren has made
valiant attempts, but pardon my saying so, it seems that some of what he
said is bogus (possibly because he is not using Windows at all--correct
me if I'm wrong).

To recapitulate, Evans is running Windows 95 without any special code
page specified. Using the Wingdings TTF character set as an example, the
following situation exists:

Wingdings has a black circle enclosing a white 2 at position (decimal)
0141 and a bold arrow pointing northeast at position 0236. This is easily
verifiable using the Character Map applet that comes with Windows, and it
is also shown for example in the table "Windows 95 TrueType Character
Sets" on page 495 of the book *Windows 95 Secrets* (IDG). Any "normal"
Windows program that allows selecting the font and entering characters
with the Alt-Num- method should give these glyphs (I've verified
it with WordPad and Word for Windows, and Evans with WordPerfect):

Alt-Num-0141  circled 2
Alt-Num-0236  NE arrow

Holmgren says that MSWrite gives

Alt-Shift-0141 NE arrow

but, like Evans, I find this hard to believe. Or rather, I suspect that
either MSWrite (which is not bundled with Win 95 or NT any more) uses
some kind of non-standard ANSI mapping or that the (assumed) fact that
Holmgren is running the program under OS/2 does something to the
character mapping. Holmgren also says that printing out all 255
characters in his Times New Roman gives "255 glyphs, each one unique".
Again, this contradicts sources such as the above mentioned book, which
shows that positions 0128, 0129, 0141-0144, 0157, and 0158 are empty in
the Times Roman TTF font that comes with Win95.

But to return to the XyWin issue. Under XyWin, with the Wingdings font
selected, I get the following:

Alt-Shift-0141  NE arrow
Alt-Shift-0236  nothing

There seems to be no obvious way of getting at the black circled 2 (ANSI
0141) in XyWin. Copying that character into the clipboard (for example
with the Character Map applet of Windows) and pasting from the clipboard
into XyWin, as Evans says, does NOT work: nothing gets inserted. Copying
ANSI 0236 on the other hand does work, it inserts the NE arrow. Now Evans
(and I, for one) would be very interested in learning how to insert ANSI
0141 in XyWin. In other words, is there a way to get XyWin to
(temporarily) use the ANSI character mapping rather than its own? (And
frankly, I was rather surprised to hear guru par excellence Holmgren ask
"what XyWrite character set?". Has he never, I wonder, looked at the
35-page long Appendix B in the XyWin manual, which starts thus: "XyWrite
has a unique character set that is designed to support a wide range of
languages. The following pages show all 909 XyWrite characters."?)

Wolfgang Bechstein
wolfie@xxxxxxxx