Private characters created with Microsoft eudcedit.exe

[Andrew McIntyre]

I have created two "private" characters using the Windows built-in eudcedit utility. The first one I have saved to a specific font and the second one I have saved to all fonts.

I can locate and copy both characters in Character Map and paste them successfully into Notepad and into my CAD programs, but not Affinity Publisher (v.1)  Is there a special procedure in Publisher that will overcome this, or is the programe not yet equipped to deal with private characters?

[MikeTO]

Hi Andrew, this is the first time anybody has asked about this so we'll have to rely on Serif to provide an official answer. But I know that eudcedit saves its characters to a file that is separate from the font which I doubt that Affinity uses, so there's probably no way to use that with Affinity. You could consider creating a custom font with your personal characters and using that font in your documents. I've done that before.

Good luck

[William Overington]

3 hours ago, Andrew McIntyre said:

I have created two "private" characters using the Windows built-in eudcedit utility. The first one I have saved to a specific font and the second one I have saved to all fonts.

I can locate and copy both characters in Character Map and paste them successfully into Notepad and into my CAD programs, but not Affinity Publisher (v.1)  Is there a special procedure in Publisher that will overcome this, or is the programe not yet equipped to deal with private characters?

I had not known of eudcedit until I saw your post and I hope to learn about it.

May I suggest that you try pasting into WordPad, then copy and paste from WordPad into Affinity Publisher.

I do not know if that will work, just a hunch.

William

 

[Andrew McIntyre]

Thanks MikeTO,

I have discovered that the same problem crops up in Apache Open Office, probably for the reason you suggest. I'm puzzled that Microsoft would bother to embed a utility that saves its characters to a file separate from the font thereby putting them beyond reach of 'regular' software.

I don't know of anyone who would want to use Notepad or CAD software  as a word processor!

[MikeTO]

@William Overington Copying and pasting to WordPad or another application and then to Affinity won't work, the character is in a font file that likely isn't accessible to Affinity.

@Andrew McIntyre This was a pretty cool feature of Microsoft to add but it is platform specific so it's not ideal for cross-platform apps. It's too bad they didn't just have it generate a standalone font that could be used with anything.

[Andrew McIntyre]

Thanks William - I tried your suggestion, but just as with Notepad the Private Character pastes successfuly into Wordpad, but then when I try to copy and paste it from Wordpad into Publisher I get an empty narrow rectangle!

[William Overington]

The empty narrow rectangle, sometimes known informally as a tofu box, is the .notdef character of the font. The way TrueType and OpenType fonts are set up is that a font does not have a glyph available for every possible character code, so if it gets a request for a glyph (loosely "the picture") for a particular character code it sends the glyph for the ,notdef symbol of the font as the response to the request. Many, though not all, fonts use an empty rectangle as the .notdef glyph.

So it seems that Affinity Publisher is receiving the code number ("the Unicode code point") but when it tries to find a glyph for the code point then there is not one located, for whatever reason.

I cannot quite remember if I have used the Private Use Area in Affinity Publisher, but I know that the Private Use Area works well in a text frame in Affinity Designer.

Have you seen Fontstruct?

https://fontstruct.com/

Maybe it would work better for you. It has the same chunky grid format. You do get a TrueType font as the output.

If you want to make fonts the High-Logic FontCreator is good, though it is a program for which one needs to pay for a licence.

FontCreator has a friendly, helpful forum.

https://www.high-logic.com/

It depends what you want to achieve, whether a one-off logo or a font for lots of use in text or whatever.

William

 

 

[William Overington]

I have asked for advice in the Unicode mailing list.

Any replies should be readable in the mailing list archive.

https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2024-February/date.html

William