From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Sun Apr 19 2009 - 11:29:32 CDT
David Starner wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Andrew West <andrewcwest@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Excuse me, but that is ridiculous. The apparent ASCII encoding of the
>> text is an extra layer added by Windows (GDI or whatever).
>
> So's the PUA encoding. The font's just a blob of bytes until given
> form and meaning by the OS, and Windows interprets it in many cases
> with an ASCII encoding.
The glyphs in Wingdings are mapped to PUA character values in the font's
CMAP table - which is effectively the basic character 'encoding' (or
glyph to character mapping) of a TTF font. This has always been the
case since the initial TTF version of Wingdings first appeared in MS
Windows.
The font does also contain an additional piece of information, the
"Microsoft Character Set" field has a value meaning "Symbol" - As far as
I can tell this is what effectively tells Windows to map the (PUA
encoded) symbol characters in the font to the 8-bit character set when
Wingdings font is selected. However nowhere in the font itself are the
glyphs mapped to ASCII or "Windows ANSI" characters. The CMAP table
contains Unicode PUA character values.
This mapping worked even if you were using Windows in Russia with a
Cyrillic code page selected - so it is something outside the font.
- C
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