🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6315@crystal9.UUCP> derosa@motcid.UUCP (John DeRosa) writes:
>>>[deleted attributions]
>
>>>I have also noticed that there are characters
>>>in most every font that *CANNOT* be reached from the keyboard.  
>
>>   I don't know how you can have characters that you can't get from the 
>>keyboard but if you have Norton Utilities, they has a 'Key Caps' like DA 
>>which also shows the required keystrokes.  I don't think that I have seen 
>>any that don't have a key stroke associated with it!  But then maybe I 
>>haven't seen them all...
>
>Yessir-re-bob, most every font has these hidden characters.  I first
>noticed them when I began to use PopChar.  PopChar allows you to 
>pull down a menu of all the possible characters in the active
>font, select the one your want and...pop...it is part of your document.

In addition to these points and the suggestions regarding using Word's
approach, there's another whole realm of characters hiding in your Adobe fonts
that are not within range of the standard ASCII 256.  Maybe this is what John
DeRosa found with PopChar.  To quote Adobe: the standard character set for
Adobe text typefaces is ISOLatin1. (Whatever that means.)  Know how it's
impossible to type pretty fractions?  Well, the darned things are actually
ALREADY in the fonts, if only we could get at them -- at least, onehalf,
onequarter and threequarters are!  Answer honestly: would you rather have, as
we currently do, ordmasculine and ordfeminine (little o and a underlined;
option-9 and option-0) available from the keyboard, or onehalf and onequarter?

     If anybody is interested, it IS possible to print these pretty little
fractions on a postscript printer (or using a postscript interpreter such as
Freedom of Press Light). I discovered this when desparately trying to typeset a
catalog for King Brand, the music paper and music writing supplies company.
Paper, especially music paper, is an ancient and noble product, and ain't sold
by the decimal dimension, not no how.  Fractions or bust.

     What you can do (short of buying ParaFont) is this: (1) Use some offbeat
stand-in character of about the right width (e.g. Capital-O-circumflex) for the
fraction you want to print. (Widths are in the .afm doct that you always
wondered when to throw away. Or just guess; fractions in most fonts tend to be
kind of plump.)  Then (2) print the postscript to disk INCLUDING the LaserPrep
header (immediately after clicking 'OK' in the Print dialog, press and hold
Cmd-K until you see a message about PostScript). (3) edit the postscript file
to take out your standin and print the fraction in its
place: look for the NAME of your standin character (e.g. Ocircumflex) in a list
of character NAMES separated by slashes (e.g. trademark/Ocircumflex/AE/oe).
Carefully replace the standin's name with the fraction's name (e.g. onehalf or
onequarter or threequarters)(note that threequarters is plural).  This is the
only place you have to do this editing; it will control ALL occurrences of the
standin character in the document.  (4) Send this edited file DIRECTLY to your
printer, using some utility like SendPS.  Don't print from your wordprocessor;
it will append another LaserPrep header and screw things up.  (5) Check your
output carefully.  Some fonts are happier about this substituting business than
others, and some standins seem to work more reliably than others.  Helvetica
gave me problems once but only once; maybe it was that corrupted version that
has been mentioned in this group.

Sorry about the length of this posting -- but this simple workaround saved my
neck, and you might enjoy having typeset fractions, too.

Ken Kreshtool
kik@wjh12.harvard.edu
Disclaimer: I have no connection with King Brand Products (212) 246-0488, the
finest supplier of music writing papers, supplies and reproduction services in
the world, except that my sister helps run the place. Reasonable prices.
Beautiful catalog.