Groups > Design > Adobe Type Manager (ATM) for Windows > Re: MS Word and non-standard chars




MS Word and non-standard chars

MS Word and non-standard chars
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:09:31 -070
We finally got some of the Pro fonts at work, and I can add things like swash
italic chars, etc.

The specimin PDF shows what chars that are available, but since I have to use
Word (corp standard) entering the "uncommon" chars requires the
Unicode value and Alt-x, e.g E000, Alt-X

Since most of the characters I need to use are in the Private Use Area and vary
from face-to-face, and styles with a typeface, I have to make my own cheat
sheet.

1. It'd be really nice if the Unicode values were included in the readme or spec
sheets or as seperate download.

2. Or if someone could suggest a proram that would take an OTF as input and
print out only the glyphs that were defined.

3. Or .... I'm very open to suggestions

Thanks

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Re: MS Word and non-standard chars
Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:33:59 -070
What operating system?  If you're running Windows, you can use Charmap
(Start/Run/Charmap) to display each font's full character set and 
unicode value. In fact, you don't even have to enter the unicode 
value, because you can copy & paste directly from Charmap.

There used to be a number of excellent (and free) Charmap replacements 
with such improvements as glyphs that are large enough to see. But I 
haven't seen any yet that are useful with extended character set 
fonts. There MUST be one :)

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Re: MS Word and non-standard chars
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:20:03 -070
O/S is WinXP SP2, Office is 2003, moving to 2007 soon

Charmap or replacement is OK (sort of), but tedious to use all the time. It also
shows all the empty "slots" and trying to find the ones I want
requires searching each time.

A nice simple cheat sheet specific to each face and style would allow me to just
keyboard in chars.

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Re: MS Word and non-standard chars
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 11:42:25 -070
I found this for the Mac, but it only displays a list of names and 
unicode values, with no images of the glyphs:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_fonts_mac.html

A very kludgy method might be to capture and print a full FontLab or 
Altsoft FTMaster display of each font. Programs like "Snag-it" can 
capture the entire contents of a window that needs to be scrolled to 
see it all.

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Re: MS Word and non-standard chars
Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:22:24 -070
Herb -- thanks for taking the time

I couldn't find any Win based progs either

There is a program called TTX that will take an OTF file and dump the cmap
table. This does give me the Unicode and the glyph name (including
'notdefined')

I could write a VBA macro to read the TTX file, and print the unicode value and
the associated glyph, but boy!!! that is really round-about for something that I
thought would be simple

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