Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!batcomputer!cloos
From: cloos@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (James H. Cloos Jr.)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Problem accessing "hidden" font characters.
Keywords: character-keyboard mapping
Message-ID: <5521@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 15 Jul 88 05:45:32 GMT
References: <617@iraun1.ira.uka.de>
Reply-To: cloos@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (James H. Cloos Jr.)
Organization: Cornell Computer Services, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
Lines: 37

One way to see what characters are in a font is to use a character editor
(resedit will do) to look at each of the characters from 0 to 255.  (In
the case of the CHICAGO font, there are 4 character below 32; this font
and its derivatives are the only ones I've seen w/ distinct, printing
characters below 32.  (I beleive the 4 are the Apple, Cloverleaf,
Checkmark, and something else--they are mostly for the sake of the Menu-
bar.)

There are some pd/sw programs that will print out a `wall-chart' of a
font.

Also, there are a few dead-keys on a mac keyboard.  opt-e, opt-i, opt-u
and opt-` are the ones I can think up off hand (on a US-spec keyboard
anyway, your mileage may vary).  These are used to make it easier to add
diacritical marks to lowercase letters.  The four I mentioned add ', ^,
umlaut, and ` respectively.  (acute, circumflex, umlaut, & grave, that
is.)  In the Symbol font and display fonts like Zapf Dingbats you have to
use these 2-key combonations to get at those 20 characters.  Also, there
may be some characters that cannot be directly accessed from a keyboard.
(I should add that as I recal, Symbol does not use all of the characters
in the region [32,255] perhaps to limit when you have to use dead-keys.

If the dead keys are different on German keyboards, you'll have to do
some experimentation to find all of the keyboard equivilents to the
characters.

Programs such as Microsoft Word allow you to specify the decimal value of
the character you want to insert.  If the software you are using does
this as well, you can use that feature to use any characters that might
be inaccessible to your keyboards.

-JimC
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