Printing Accented Characters

[Robert Holmgren]

Dear SysOp: I'm contemplating switching over to the Bitstream Speedo charset.
I think I can convert about 70% of my character set to extended Bitstream
characters (above 255). 25% can be overstruck with accents. Examples:
 d + [741] = d underdot (percussive forced d, dum-de-dum-dum)
 e + [734] = e lower breve (short e, "bread")

On a LaserJet (II), how do I do this? I simply want to backspace and print the
second (accent) character, whatever it is. Tried making an attribute
"AT<{Ascii-8}", assigned it a name and a MoDe, surrounded the accent
®MDxx¯accent®MDNM¯ -- but it printed a space instead (seems to want more in the
way of a "string" than a single Ascii-8). Can't find anything about the PB
command in the manual (seems to have gotten lost!). No underdot appears in the
accent table. Finally tried a desperate PI command ®PI{Ascii-8}¯, and that
does work of course, but it screws up the line widths, plus -- let's see, how
many can I get on a line ... well, you can get at least 13 on a line, which is
progress (used to be a limit of 4, I think). Is this what we're supposed to do
to combine an accent and a character??

Secondly, for those 5% of characters that have no correspondence at all, and
you can't force the shape by overstriking, such as the IPA character for "ng"
(the ng in junket, truncate - a separate consonant in many languages - it
looks, though doesn't sound, a bit like Greek eta), have we hope for a
different offering of characters from other Bitstream fonts? I am very
confused about the "XyWrite Character Set" and the table that shows "all 909
XyWrite characters" (Xy4 Customization Guide p.E-2ff). Several hundred of
those XyWrite characters are not "Bitstream Supported". If they don't exist in
Speedo fonts, then how do we access them? What's the XyW Char Set<==>Speedo
distinction? I thought they were one and the same!


Whoops, returning to printing accents for a moment, I forgot to mention that
with non-Speedo bitmapped soft fonts, it's sufficient to embed a 1- or 3-byte
Ascii-8 directly in the text; but with DUTCH or COURIER 23Z, you can't do it
(they print the Ascii-8 symbol instead!). Seems to me there's a code you can
send to the LJ to tell it how to treat a control code like Ascii-8, but I've
forgotten...