I'm trying to use fonts from the Nitti Basic family for programming. These fonts are packaged as OpenType PostScript OTF files.
Its U+002D (HYPHEN-MINUS) glyph works well as a hyphen, but not so well as a minus.
For example, it doesn't line up with the horizontal bar of the plus sign.
On the other hand, Nitti's glyph for U+2212 (MINUS) is perfect as a minus (of course), and this is what I need when programming. It's not feasible for me to actually use codepoint U+2212; after all, U+002D is what you get when you press the minus sign on the keyboard and it's what programming languages use for subtraction.
So instead I'd like to steal the glyph from U+2212 and use it for U+002D, so that that character looks like a minus sign.
How can I do it?
Update: Yes, it is possible to use U+002D as a hyphen in source code.
As mentioned above, a minus sign is what I need.
I agree with Jukka, there are tools to do this.
However, please don't forget that a font is usually protected by very similar contracts as software. In this case the link you provided for example points to a legal document that reads (amongst much other):
"Except as permitted herein, you may not rename, modify, adapt,
translate, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, alter or
otherwise copy the Bold Monday Font Software."
Notice the fact that you're not permitted legally to change this font. If you read the rest of the agreement you'll see a lot of restrictions on the actual use of the font as well. Make sure you're not breaking your license by what you are doing...
For posterity, here's how to do it:
Obtain Adobe's AFDKO font tools and install them.
Put the OTF files into an empty directory.
Run ttx *.otf to convert the OTF files to TTX (XML).
Edit each TTX file in a text editor:
In the cmap section, change occurrences of hyphen to minus. This table maps characters to glyphs. Character U+002D was originally mapped to the hyphen glyph; this change maps it to the minus glyph.
Over the whole file, change ocurrences of NittiBasic to NittiBasicM and Nitti Basic to Nitti Basic M. This will distinguish the modified version of the font from the original once it's installed.
Rename the TTX files, replacing Nitti Basic with Nitti Basic M.
Run ttx -b *.ttx to convert the TTX files back to OTF.
Finally, install the newly-created OTF files.
Tools like FontForge can be used to edit a font in a simple manner.
Note that in programming, too, HYPHEN-MINUS has multiple uses: as a minus sign, but also (in some languages) as allowed in identifiers, as well as in comments, where it usually appears in the role of hyphen. In some uses, a HYPHEN glyph will look odd.
Related
In xcode, developing for iOS "\u{1F3F3}\u{FE0F}\u{200D}\u{1F308}" is a rainbow flag.
"\u{1F3F3}" is a white flag, and "\u{1F308}" is a rainbow. The middle symbols "\u{FE0F}\u{200D}" are invisible symbols used to join these two together to make the rainbow flag symbol.
I am trying to combine unicode characters to make a rainbow infinity symbol, but not exactly sure how to implement this.
Not sure if there is an already existing unicode character or apple api I can use to do this, but would appreciate learning how to do this
I wouldn't mind having an infinity symbol over the rainbow flag either (like the apple anti-lgbt flag incident) as an alternative.
Emoji fonts are still just fonts. If they don’t contain a specific glyph, then they cannot display that glyph. The reason “🏳️🌈” looks like a rainbow flag is because someone drew a picture of a rainbow flag and then defined their font in such a way that the sequence <U+1F3F3, U+FE0F, U+200D, U+1F308> would be displayed using that specific image. Much like how someone first had to define the precise shape of the letter “A” in their font and then apply that glyph to the codepoint U+0041.
There is no image-rendering code that instinctively knows how to apply the colours of 🌈 to the shape of 🏳️ and then automatically generates a new glyph on the fly. It’s all explicitly pre-defined.
U+200D is the so-called Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ), so emoji sequences using that character are appropriately named Zero Width Joiner Sequences. They were originally invented by Apple to support emoji that weren’t part of the Unicode standard (in particular, variants of 💏, 💑, and 👪️ with different gender configurations), but later other vendors jumped on board as well and nowadays they are officially part of Unicode as an alternative way for defining new emoji without having to encode entirely new characters. Currently, about a third of all officially recommended emoji are ZWJ sequences.
In theory, any person can make up their own ZWJ sequences just by joining existing characters together (as was their original intent). In your case, “♾️+ZWJ+🌈” or <U+267E, U+FE0F, U+200D, U+1F308> would be an obvious sequence for a rainbow-coloured infinity symbol. You just have to create your own font containing the glyph you want, and then distribute that font to other people so that they can see the same glyph as you. There are just a few problems:
Making fonts with colourful glyphs is not easy. I couldn’t tell you whether there even exist freely available tools for that task.
There are four different formats for emoji fonts (used by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla respectively) and they generally do not work on each other’s platforms, so you would need to create not just one, but several fonts unless you don’t care about people on other operating systems.
Installing your own fonts is not possible on most mobile phones, so your custom emoji would mostly only be available to desktop users.
What does FC_WEIGHT refer to? Please advise: Although a text file was produced it is large and consists largely of numbers which makes it hard to proofread. I need relatively good confidence the output matches the input. If there is a fix please point me to it and bring joy to my dull drab existence.
entered the command
ps2ascii /Users/dwstclair/Desktop/untitled3/stmt_20181130.pdf a.txt
The result was:
DEBUG: FC_WEIGHT didn't match
On the off chance a default font was missing on my system
I added DroidSansFallback.ttf (no joy)
Basically, I wouldn't use ps2ascii. Its long been deprecated and doesn't even ship in more recent versions of Ghostscript.
Instead consider using the txtwrite device. It works with a wider range of input (in particular it can use ToUnicode CMaps in PDF files, which ps2ascii cannot) and is capable of producing output in other than ASCII, which is quite useful. Even if you aren't working with non-Latin languages, the ability to preserve ligatures (eg fi, ffi, ffl etc) is convenient.
The actual answer to your question is 'don't worry about it'.
FC_WEIGHT refers to the weight of a font (light, bold, regular, ExtraBold etc). This message can only arise when you are using FontConfig, and Ghostscript is enumerating the available fonts from font config, trying to find a match for a missing font in the input. This means that a candidate font did not match the target font's weight.
Since you aren't going to use the font, it doesn't affect you.
xmgrace is wonderful, but it has some problems when dealing with miscellaneous characters.
How can I make the script small l ($\ell$ in latex) in xmgrace?
I believe the only way to do this is to specify a script-like system font. None of the standard ones are suitable so you will have to make sure that a suitable font is installed on your system.
You can change to any font by enclosing the name in
\f{}
e.g.
\f{Symbol}
or
\f{Century-Schoolbook-L-Bold_italic}
You can see a list of the available fonts (and their labels) by going to the Font tool in the Window menu of the xmgrace GUI.
After typing the special character you can return to your original font in a similar way, or by using \0 to get back to the default font 0.
I thought Julia supports raw unicode input, such as:
julia> test = "π£¢∞§"
"π£¢∞§"
julia> 😘 = 1 ;
julia> print(😘 )
1
However, it seems julia does not support (Apple logo).
julia> = 123
ERROR: syntax: invalid character ""
julia> test = ""
"\uf8ff"
I wonder what's the underlying reason for that, and whether there is a way I can use character in Julia?
I believe this link more properly explains the case of the unicode character that you see as apple's logo.
The problem is that the unicode value used is one of several that is set aside for private use. That means that each operating system, or application, or implementation is free to use those unicode characters for anything they want. It just so happens that Apple has chosen to use unicode character U+F8FF (decimal value 63743, or on the web as either or ) as the Apple Logo. But some Windows fonts put in a Windows logo. And some other fonts put in a Klingon Mummification glyph. Or elven script. Or anything they want. And if it isn't defined in your local font, you'll just see a square.
My opinion is that Julia simply doesn't use this special value for anything. This also explains why your "π£¢∞§" characters work nicely - they are proper unicode characters, more largely supported by different platforms.
As a side note, i too see a simple square instead of the apple logo on this instance.
Edit
Here is a list of unicode characters supported by Julia.
To expand on Alex's answer...
Apple's logo () isn't an official Unicode symbol. I think there are very few commercial logos and symbols in the main Unicode tables.
However, Unicode provides some 'anything goes' areas (called PUAs - private use areas) that companies and individuals can fill with their own symbols, so that their users can access certain special glyphs. The main PUA is U+E000 to U+F8FF. Depending on which font you're using, you'll find all kinds of stuff assigned to these codes. On a Mac, I can usually get the Apple logo at "\uf8ff", with the right font selected, but not the Ubuntu symbol or the Windows logo, unless I choose another font. (There's also a fallback mechanism, whereby if you request a code point that the current font doesn't have, the OS will find a suitable substitute in another font and use that.)
[
In Julia, you can only use certain Unicode characters for variable names. Julia wouldn't allow anything from the private use area anyway, unless some fonts were distributed to every computer and everyone agreed on who had which Unicode point. (Mathematica makes extensive use of PUA symbols in their notebooks, because they can and do install their own fonts, and can then access various glyphs from the PUA in the notebook with guaranteed results.)
You are allowed to use emoji characters as variable names, so you could try the Emoji apple, rather than the Apple apple:
Does anyone knows how to generate Chinese characters using Postscript or related tools? I'd like to use unicode to represent Chinese characters but it seems that Postscript doesn't support unicode, yet. In addition, I'd like to specify several fonts to generate the same character.
Thus, I have two questions:
1. how to use unicode in Postscript? Or how to enumerate Chinese Character set in the postscript way?
2. How to specify the fonts configurations using Postscript?
At last, in case postscript cannot do this job, what tools should I turn to for my purpose?
Thank you very much!
-Jin
In Adobe's official PostScript language specification there is no specific support for Unicode fonts. (And this is the final version of the spec for PS Level 3, valid since its publication in 1999 -- PostScript as a language is no longer developed...)
However, PostScript supports (since Level 2) multi-byte fonts (2-, 3- and 4-bytes) in a generic way (see 'CID'). All PostScript fonts need an "encoding": an encoding basically is a table telling at which index position of a font which glyph description for a given character can be found. So while there are no Unicode fonts as such, there are multi-byte CID fonts which provide ranged subsets of Unicode.
Also, there are no freely re-distributable CMaps. (A CMap .) If you need a CMap, you have to derive it from the Windows codepage and the matching Adobe CMap.
If you just look for a "super-simple" method to use Unicode text strings with no need of checking for ranges, language etc.: sorry to disappoint you. There is no way. That would be a pipe dream.
Have a look at CID-keyed fonts instead. These are designed to include a large number of glyphs. (Page 364ff in PLRM)
Update: Linked to the correct page with CID font description.