Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!motcsd!starnet!mzellers
From: mzellers@starnet.uucp (Mark Zellers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Composite accented characters
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.180510.22349@starnet.uucp>
Date: 25 Mar 91 18:05:10 GMT
References: <5916@acorn.co.uk>
Reply-To: mzellers@starnet.UUCP (Mark Zellers)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Starnet-Public Access UNIX-Los Altos,CA 415-949-3133, login:info
Lines: 30

In article <5916@acorn.co.uk> bcockburn@acorn.co.uk (Bruce Cockburn) writes:
>
>  Does anyone know how to add accented characters to a font that doesn't
>have the ones that you want like "uring" or is this not possible?
>
If you are looking for characters such as a-umlaut, e-grave, etc, they
actually already exist in the standard PostScript fonts.  They are not,
however *encoded* which means that there is no character you can send to
the printer and get the accented characters printed without doing some
fiddling.

The prefered method is explained in the PostScript Tutorial and Cookbook
under the heading "Re-Encoding an Existing Font" or some such.  The idea
is to produce a new encoding vector which maps an ordinal character
number to the name of the character you want.  The characters and their
names are listed in the PostScript Language Reference manual (Red Book).
Many of the more modern printers have a pre-defined encoding vector
called ISOLatin1 available which is very close to the Dec Multinational
character set.

Once the encoding vector is defined, you create a new font dictionary
and copy everything in the base font dictionary except the encoding
vector and the unique id fields.  Then you register the new dictionary
as a font and can use it from there.  It is not as hard as it sounds,
especially when they give you the code to copy.  It is too bad however
that they did not make the re-encoding a standard part of the language
so that everyone didn't have to learn this little rain dance.

Mark H. Zellers
marc.com!bwayne!mark