outline fonts and encodings

[JHUBBARD at smith.smith.edu]

>> Apparently the key is to tell the font that its encoding is not
>> "StandardEncoding" but "FontSpecific".  If Fontographer is being used, then
>> the trick is apparently to set the font to have a "Symbol" character set.
>> Then OS/2 will leave it alone, and the characters will be displayed in
>> their proper places.
>  and, unfortunately, saying symbol (or OEM) torches the font for windows-
>  truetype.  I suspect that until unicode (a 'real' character set---except it
>  doesn't support CSX) arrives in force, anyone with odd character tastes
>  is going to need to keep font manipulation utilities at hand because there
>  will be no across the board solutions.
> 

Can you please explain why setting the font as symbol or OEM  would "torch 
it" for Windows? I have gone bonkers trying to get my good 'ole HP bitmap 
fonts to work with Windows, precisely because of the re-mapping to ANSI 
that takes place (I see the correct character on screen but it PRINTS a 
character mapped from the ANSI set. Tho I have pretty much put the project 
aside, I had figured that if I set the font as OEM it would no longer 
perform the helpful!!@#$#$ re-mapping.

By the by, I have also had the same experience trying to take PC Word 
Perfect documents to Word Perfect on the Mac-- those damn friendly machines 
re-map for you. I can imagine that for some folks it actually works (given 
that a French accent, say, is in a different upper ASCII slot in the PC 
Roman 8 character set than whatever the Mac uses), but it drove me nuts. 
Again, I simply gave up. Perhaps if somebody understands the mapping a 
table could be devised to translate the translated text!

Jamie Hubbard, Smith College