I'm looking at formatting a utf8 free text string to fit an exact column width on a terminal. I'm coding various truncation methods (left/middle/right) for long strings however, when the truncation break point lies over a wide character, such as an emoji, the display column counting falls apart. some form of padding is needed for the 'half wide' column placement.
Is there a suitable narrow character to show that indicates we do have valid unicode character, but insufficient display space to show it, as opposed to the special replacement character � usually used for invalid unicode ??
Example: on a fixed spacing terminal fit two smiley emojis into the space that would fit 'aaa'. e.g. "👨👨" ! so need a, preferably standardised, substitute character for the second emoji/wide character, e.g. "👨⋮" to fit that three wide space.
A side issue is trying to work out when decomposed composite characters start and end, (also are there combining prefixes?). It looks like the next code point needs to be read to see if it is still zero width (e.g. 'o' U+006F, then 'umlaut' U+0308, rather than ö U+00F6; don't stop after the plain 'o').
Related
I'm combining some characters with unicode combining marks. Some marks when presented in labels, however appear shifted to the right, this is not the actual example but let's say I were to combine A and ˚. Instead of having Å, i have A˚. If I copy the text and paste it somewhere else, the character appears perfect (Å).
To combine the characters I use a method that does this:
Character("\(character)\(mark)")
Where character would be a letter and mark an accent or another combining mark.
I read that this may happen because some fonts don't support certain characters. The font I use for my labels where I display the combined stuff is the systemFont.
Why is this happening? How can I prevent combined characters from being shifted to the right?
When a textbox, browser or other program can't display a character, or the character is not valid unicode, a white-box character is drawn instead to represent the missing glyph.
I assume that this box-glyph is a Unicode character itself, thus I am looking for its codepoint so I can use it. Does anyone know which codepoint is used, or perhaps if my assumption is wrong and it is not necessarily a member of the font?
At first I thought it might be the White Square (U+25A1), but, after I compared this glyph with an example, I found white square was smaller. There is a larger variant of it (medium and large), but these do not appear in the font under consideration, so these can not be the ones I am seeing.
I managed to find my answer, here on stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/22636426/2718186
Particularly, the part that talks about .notdef glyph. It seems that fonts reserve a special glyph, that is not mapped to by any Unicode point, to indicate that a character has no glyph in the current font.
I am trying to minimize the vertical distance between controls on a programmatically constructed Windows Form (using C#). This involves setting the Height property appropriately.
I have found that if the text of the control does not contain any letters with descenders in them (i.e. does not have any of the characters j, g, p, q or y) then the control Height can be smaller than when it does contain such letters (if it does contain letters with descenders then the descenders are chopped off if the Height isn't enough).
It will work fine to test for any of the above 5 characters as long as the language is English, or English - like, but I need to be able to cater for (just about) any language.
Is there a way, given some arbitrary Unicode character (and perhaps a font) to determine if that Unicode character has a descender or not?
There is no property defined for Unicode characters to indicate the presence of a descender, and it’s really a feature of glyph design rather than characters. For example, “Q” has a descenders in many fonts, and “J” has one in some. Besides, given the context, you should also consider diacritic marks placed below a letter, not just descenders of base letters. And probably diacritics above letters, too.
So you would need to read the font information (when available) about character dimensions, or tentatively draw characters in your software and measure their dimensions.
As a rule of thumb, any line height below 1.1 times the font size will cause problems with some characters and fonts. Using 1 (“setting solid”) is not enough, because characters may in fact extend outside the font size.
In Windows, you call GetPath() to get an array containing the X/Y coordinates of every point making up the perimeter or outline of the string of glyphs. Search the array for min/max, which will get you the rectangle exactly enclosing the string. Right to the edge of the letters.
I'm looking for a font which contains a graphic character which is (essentially), the space character, inverted. I'm looking for a graphic character equivalent to the largest-possible solid-black box. The closest I have been able to find is Wingings 2 character 162, but that doesn't fill the entire available character space. When I insert two consecutive Wingdings 2 162 characters, there is still appreciable whitespace between them when displayed or printed. Does anyone know of a black-box font/character which would fill all available character space?
All characters are going to have whitespace between them, or they would be unreadable. This is called "kerning". You can adjust the kerning and line-height in whatever program you are using to send the malicious fax, if you want to be sure to use the maximum amount of toner per page.
Have you considered creating your own font using a software package like this or like this? You could edit the space character to be a solid black square. But as Chris McCall mentioned, you may still have space between characters of any size due to kerning applied by the layout engine that draws the fonts.
You other option is to owner draw your own text and programmatically replacing spaces with black boxes. You would have complete control over kerning and everything else.
I don't know if this is exactly what you were looking for, but...
I was looking for the same thing, since I wanted to create a "textbox" when I wanted to write text using the spritefont, but I never knew how long the total string was going to be, so I wanted something that I could "write" in the same location right before the string with a contrasting color which could be expected to be as long as the string it needed to encompass. That being the case, try:
Webdings - character 103.
I tried lining them up and there wasn't even any space in between. Perfect.
Characters included in BMP as specified by 4 digits,
and those characters outside of BMP contains 5 or 6 digits.
But my doubt is:
how is the finanal character drawed from value of code point?
Are the pictures of each character restored in each computer and when displaying just show the matching picture?
Or the final glyph is a computed result of code point itself?
Each Unicode character has a code. The software displaying the character obtains a glyph for that character code - usually from a font installed onto the hosting computer. It then uses the obtained glyph to display the character.
If it can't find a glyph for that character (many fonts for Latin characters completely omit the glyphs used for East Asian languages characters) it formally can't display it. It will then either indicate error or use a supplement glyph meaning that the actual glyph can't be displayed (it can be a question mark or a square or whatever).