From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 13:29:30 EST
John Hudson wrote as follows.
>Here's an exercise for your enthusiasm, William: devise the form of the
>perfect .notdef glyph. It needs to unambiguously indicate that a glyph is
>missing, i.e. it should be something that can easily be mistaken for a
>dingbat, and it needs to be easy to spot in proofreading in both print and
>onscreen (some applications, e.g. Adobe InDesign, make the latter a bit
>easier by applying colour highlight to the .notdef glyph).
Thank you for the design brief.
Here is my design.
The design consists of a single contour in as large a square box as is
possible for the particular font.
In my prototype I used a box 2048 font units by 2048 font units. In this
case, the value of n is 1024.
The contour has seven points, the first point and the last point being at
the same place.
Point 1 is at (0,0) and is on the curve.
Point 2 is at (0,2n) and is off the curve.
Point 3 is at (2n,2n) and is on the curve.
Point 4 is at (2n,n) and is on the curve.
Point 5 is at (n,n) and is on the curve.
Point 6 is at (n,0) and is on the curve.
Point 7 is at (0,0) and is on the curve.
This has the effect of making the glyph easy to draw, solid enough to be
specifically noticeable, distinctively shaped with both a curved line and
straight lines so that it stands out and in an arc which goes against the
normal arc of design of a graphical user interface of the input screen of a
computer program so as also hopefully to make it more noticeable. In
addition, the design has white space set out in a manner such that where
several copies of the glyph appear in sequence on a page of text, they are
easily counted.
I hope that you like the design.
William Overington
6 November 2002
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