|
Character Sets Used by Fonts
All fonts use a character set. A character set contains punctuation marks,
numerals, uppercase and lowercase letters, and all other printable characters.
Each element of a character set is identified by a number.
Most character sets used in Windows are supersets of the U.S. ASCII character
set, which defines characters for the 96 numeric values from 32 through 127.
There are five major groups of character sets:
- Windows
- Unicode
- OEM (original equipment manufacturer)
- Symbol
- Vendor-specific
Windows Character Set
The Windows character set is the most commonly used character set in Windows
programming. It is essentially equivalent to the ANSI character set. The blank
character is the first character in the Windows character set. It has a
hexadecimal value of 0x20 (decimal 32). The last character in the Windows character set
has a hexadecimal value of 0xFF (decimal 255).
Many fonts specify a default character. Whenever a request is made for a
character that is not in the font, Windows provides this default character. Many
fonts using the Windows character set specify the period (.) as the default
character. TrueType fonts typically use an open box as the default character.
Fonts use a break character called a quad to separate words and justify text.
Most fonts using the Windows character set specify that the blank character
will serve as the break character.
Windows version 3.1 added 24 characters to the Windows code page, as shown in
the following table.
Character
| Name
| Windows character code
|
| base line single quote
| 130
|
| florin
| 131
|
| base line double quote
| 132
|
| ellipsis
| 133
|
| dagger
| 134
|
| double dagger
| 135
|
| circumflex
| 136
|
| permille
| 137
|
| S Hacek
| 138
|
| left single guillemet
| 139
|
| OE ligature
| 140
| '
| left single quote
| 145
| '
| right single quote
| 146
| "
| left double quote
| 147
| "
| right double quote
| 148
|
| bullet
| 149
| 
| en dash
| 150
| 
| em dash
| 151
|
| tilde
| 152
|
| trademark ligature
| 153
|
| s Hacek
| 154
|
| right single guillemet
| 155
|
| oe ligature
| 156
|
| Y Dieresis
| 159
|
It should be noted that the characters for left and right single quote were
first added to the character set for the release of Windows version 3.0.
Unicode Character Set
The Windows ANSI character uses 8 bits to represent each character; therefore,
the maximum number of characters that can be expressed using 8 bits is 256
(2^8). This is usually sufficient for Western languages, including the diacritical
marks used in French, German, Spanish, and other languages. However, Eastern
languages employ thousands of separate characters, which cannot be encoded by
using a single-byte coding scheme. With the proliferation of computer commerce,
double-byte coding schemes were developed so that characters could be
represented in 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit sequences. This requires complicated
passing algorithms; even so, using different code sets could yield entirely
different results on two different computers.
To address the problem of multiple coding schemes, the Unicode standard for
data representation was developed. A 16-bit character coding scheme, Unicode can
represent 65,536 (2^16) characters, which is enough to include all languages in
computer commerce today, as well as punctuation marks, mathematical symbols,
and room for future expansion. Unicode establishes a unique code for every
character to ensure that character translation is always accurate.
OEM Character Set
The OEM character set is typically used in full-screen MS-DOSฎ sessions for screen display. Characters 32 through 127 are usually the same
in the OEM, U.S. ASCII, and Windows character sets. The other characters in the
OEM character set (0 through 31 and 128 through 255) correspond to the
characters that can be displayed in a full-screen MS-DOS session. These characters are
generally different from the Windows characters.
Symbol Character Set
The Symbol character set contains special characters typically used to
represent mathematical and scientific formulas.
Vendor-Specific Character Sets
Many printers and other output devices provide fonts based on character sets
that differ from the Windows and OEM sets for example, the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC)
character set. To use one of these character sets, the printer driver translates
from the Windows character set to the vendor-specific character set.
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