Frame's keys for special chars

Subject: Frame's keys for special chars
From: Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 08:19:10 CST

Various folks have been discussing special characters in general and
FrameMaker in specific. I just have this to add:

The ASCII position of a special character has absolutely NOTHING to
do with the software. It is a function of typeface design. The map
of where a character is in the character set is decided by the font
designer. There is a standard (ASCII), but it covers only the first 128
character positions. Everything above 07F is undefined by ASCII.

Now back to type face design. A favorite of mine, ITC's Korinna. In it
the dash occupies its ASCII position of 02Dh, but since hyphens and
en and em dashes are not covered in standard ASCII, ITC's Korinna places
them at 106h, 107h, and 10Ah respectively.

There is no character occupying 97h in ITC Korinna. That would
correspond to 151 offered by some of you as the position of the em
dash in your pet typeface. In fact, all of the (PostScript) typefaces
I use leave the range of 80 to 9F blank. Some of them actually do
define characters all the way up to 13Ch, which is WAY outside ASCII.

And don't go looking for the characters to occupy the same position
in PS fonts as they do in TrueType. You'll get yourself in trouble
making assumtions like that.

_______________ _____
/ ___ __/__\ \ / / _\ Steve Fouts
/___ \| | ___\ | / __\ sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
/ / \ | \ / \
/_______/__|_______\_/________\ "But what else would you expect them to say
to defend themselves? They are writers; they are professional liars."
-- Harlan Ellison


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