Re: Symbols

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 11/20/2012 5:21 PM, Willi Egger wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> could someone bring light into the way how to use symbols…in MKIV
>
> I wanted to extract a symbol from uzdr (Zapfdingbats).

(Somehow uzdr.afm and uzdr.pfb are not in my tex tree. I always thought 
that they were part of the standalone but nothing surprises me as these 
fonts have a history of instability.)

(Copied from an upcoming font manual:)

\startsection[title=Unicoding]

Nowadays we will mostly use fonts that ship with a \UNICODE\ aware 
encoding. And
in \CONTEXT, even if we use a \TYPEONE\ font, it gets mapped onto \UNICODE.
However, there are some exceptions, for instance the Zapf Dingbats in 
\TYPEONE\
format. These have a rather obscure private encoding and the glyph names 
run from
\type {a1} upto \type {a206} and have no relation to what the glyph 
represents.

In the case of Dingbats we're somewhat lucky that they ended up in 
\UNICODE, so
we can relocate the glyphs to match their rightful place. This is done 
by means
of a goodies file. We already discussed this in \in {section} [goodies] 
so we
only repeat the usage.

\startbuffer
\definefontfeature
   [dingbats]
   [mode=base,
    goodies=dingbats,
    unicoding=yes]

\definefontsynonym
   [ZapfDingbats]
   [file:uzdr.afm]
   [features=dingbats]
\stopbuffer

\typebuffer \getbuffer

I tend to qualify the Dingbat font in \TEX\ distributions as rather unstable
because of name changes and them either or not being included. Therefore 
it's best to
use the hard coded name because that triggers the most visible error 
message when
the font is not found.

A font like this can for instance be used with the glyph placement 
macros as is
demonstrated below. In the last line we see that a direct \UTF\ input 
also works
out well.

\starttabulate[|||]
\HL
\NC \type{\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{\number"2701}} \NC 
\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{\number"2701} \NC \NR
\NC \type{\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{\char"2701}}   \NC 
\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{\char"2701}   \NC \NR
\NC \type{\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{a1}}           \NC 
\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{a1}           \NC \NR
\NC \type{\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{a11}}          \NC 
\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats*dingbats}{a11}          \NC \NR
\HL
\NC \type{\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats}{\number"2701}}          \NC 
\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats}{\number"2701}          \NC \NR
\NC \type{\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats}{\char"2701}}            \NC 
\getglyphdirect     {ZapfDingbats}{\char"2701}            \NC \NR
\NC \type{\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats}{a1}}                    \NC 
\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats}{a1}                    \NC \NR
\NC \type{\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats}{a11}}                   \NC 
\getnamedglyphdirect{ZapfDingbats}{a11}                   \NC \NR
\HL
\NC \type{\definedfont[ZapfDingbats*dingbats]✁}                      \NC 
\definedfont[ZapfDingbats*dingbats]✁                      \NC \NR
\HL
\stoptabulate

Keep in mind that fonts like Dejavu (that we use here as document font) 
already
has these characters which is why it shows up in the verbose part of the 
table.

\stopsection

-- 

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