Comments on: Don’t use Wingdings

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

My Unicode 61664 gives a cute little ear. At least it looks like an ear.

Wingdings etc are clearly just for people who want to type up family newsletters etc and print them up themselves; they certainly can't be trusted in any other application (or on anyone else's computer).

And Word is totally bogus on Unicode anyway; try getting it to display a character that's in your font but outside the bottom 256. I can't figger it anyway.

By: Alan Green

Alan Green — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

Matt: Try using Insert>Symbol – it shows all the glyphs in each font. “Lucida Sans Unicode” is an OK Unicode font. It has European letters, mathematics, arrows and IPA symbols.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

My Insert>Symbol only shows a pitiful handful of the glyphs actually in the font; even good old Times New Roman has things like OE thorn and edh which show up in Font Book but not in the Symbol charts. Symbol only seems to give you (quickly counts) 224 characters no matter how you slice it… this is on a Mac mind you so we may be hobbled by the Word build.

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

This excerpt from the blog entry above:

"Note that in each case the characters are symantically different."

seems to indicate that you've come of age in the era in which the spelling of the word pronounced "suh-man-tick" has been dominated by the creatively misspelled name of certain large software company. I believe the word you meant to use is spelled "semantically"...

By: alastair

alastair — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

Thanks for the spelling correction. I wouldn’t read too much into it though…

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

This gets particularly annoying when people compose e-mails in Outlook, and all their smileys turn into “J”s. Why? Simple: typing in “:)” AutoCorrects to the smiley character in WingDings, which, of course, is mapped to the letter J.

By: codeman38

codeman38 — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

Matt: Try enabling the Character Palette under System Preferences → International → Input Menu. It works in Word 2004, at least, though not in the original version of Word X.

By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

OK it’s not a difficult fix, probably three lines worth of XSLT, but I mean really.

Turns out that you can’t do it without some EXSLT extensions and then it’s still a bit more than three lines.

[Edited to fix URL with Aristotle's permission - Alastair]

By: alastair

alastair — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

Aristotle, I am in awe of your l337 XSLT skillz.

However I don't see any reason why the element couldn't be converted into the &x#abcd; numeric entity in the general case. Your code handles and additional constraint that I don't see as being a general one..

By: Aristotle Pagaltzis

Aristotle Pagaltzis — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 21:22:51 +0000

You wanted to escape that entity’s ampersand, I think. Anyway, yes, I forgot about that – if you have a pipeline for XML and adding an extra stage to it is no problem, then indeed it could be achieved quite easily with the aid of disable-output-escaping in a preprocessing transform. Dirty as all heck, but it certainly involves much less swinging from tree to tree in the jungle at 90mph than I had to go through to avoid preprocessing.

Note that as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, if your XSLT processor’s document function understands the data: scheme, you need neither preprocessing nor my gruesomely fascinating code accident – you can go straight for the jugular by abusing it to reinvoke the XML parser on the spot.