Solved: Print Unicode Character Map

[Paul_Hossler]

Is there a way to create a specimin sheet of only the defined glyphs in a Opentype font, all the up to the high areas, Private Use Area and beyond?

Creating a doc with all the char numbers, and changing to the font doesn't eliminate the undefined glyphs, and in some fonts there's a lot.

If I take a doc, enter E000 + Alt-x I get a blank (wide as a space).

I can't figure out how to tell that characters like E000 are not defined.

Using TTX http://www.letterror.com/code/ttx/index.html

I can dump the cmap table and see
<map code="0x1e" name=".notdef"/>
<map code="0x1f" name=".notdef"/>
<map code="0x20" name="space"/>
<map code="0x21" name="exclam"/>
<map code="0x22" name="quotedbl"/>

which gives me the Unicode, the glyph name, and if it's undefined. So somewhere the information is in the TTF or OTF file.

(I even thought about reading the txt output file from TTX, but decided that doing it that was was really round-about)


What I'd really like to do is

1. Run a macro and select a font (uninstalled would be really nice)
2. Have it create a doc with the glyph name, the glyph, the unicode value needed to keyboard it, so I could print it out as a quick reference.

Thanks

Paul

[fionabolt]

Paul

What operating system are you using? What is wrong with using Character Map (CharMap.exe) a freeware utility included with MS Windows. This can be used to view the characters in any installed font, to check what keyboard input is used to enter those characters, and to copy characters to the clipboard.

[Paul_Hossler]

O/S XP Pro, Sp2, Office 2003 -- Thanks, I have used Charmap and several like it. It works, but is not very concise -- there are a lot of gaps (undefined glyphs) in most fontd; you have to scroll around a lot to find the ones you want; and the letter size is pretty small


If there were a way to put the defined ones into a doc, I could edit out the ones that I had no use for. I had started a macro, but filtering out the undefined glyphs as pretty hard.

I have found that even between fonts from the same type family (Regular vs. Italic) the chars do no really match up, so each face and each style would need it's own cheat sheet.

Paul

[fionabolt]

Paul

In Word VBA help there are two pages "Character Set (0=127)" and "Character Set (128-255)" I use these as a reference for key strokes. Otherwise I always use Char Map, especially as this also gives you symbols that are not unicode, and do not have key strokes.

Otherwise what you are trying to achieve sounds like an awful lot of hard work and effort. Also printed out reference guides are not a very smart way of using technology. As soon as you have printed them out they become history as any updates made on your client will not be represented in the printout.

If you persist then good luck...

[Paul_Hossler]

All very good points

Typically the Private Use Area starting at E000 are where the characters are that I would like to have readily available. Normally I'd do an Autocorrect entry to insert one of these, except that between faces and styles of faces the slots to not line up consistantly.

Looks like it'll have to be Charmap

Thanks

Paul