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ClayHelberg18-Opal
18-Opal
July 18, 2011
Question

Symbol characters in custom menus?

  • July 18, 2011
  • 4 replies
  • 1127 views
Hi Folks—



I’m running into an issue with a customization. We are defining custom menu entries, some of which contain special characters like U+2611 (check box with check: ? for those of you with font support in email). Everything works OK in my Windows Vista + Arbortext 5.4 setup, but the special characters don’t appear in the customer’s Windows XP + Arbortext 5.4 setup.



Has anyone run into this before? If so, did you find a workaround for displaying these special characters? Thanks for any wisdom you can share.



--Clay



Clay Helberg

Senior Consultant

TerraXML



    4 replies

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    GarethOakes16-Pearl
    16-Pearl
    July 19, 2011
    Hi Clay,

    I don't have specific experience with this particular area of Arbortext, but it sounds like a font issue to me. Vista and Windows 7 use a different default font for GUI elements (compared to XP). The new font is Segoe UI and I'm pretty sure the old font was Tahoma. It is likely that the XP font Tahoma did not contain a glyph for U+2611.

    An alternative (or parallel?) theory might be that font substitution support was improved in Vista+W7 but I haven't read anything about that.

    I don't know if there is a way to customise the UI font for Arbortext, but if there was I would be tempted to try that first to see if that helps. I guess as a brute force fallback you could create a new WinXP user profile and set the Windows GUI font for the whole of that user profile, then run Arbortext. You could also use something like FontForge to explore the Windows XP GUI font and discover if it does have U+2611 or not.

    (BTW, if you haven't found it yet, there is a Win32 version of FontForge available from here:
    C
    ClayHelberg18-OpalAuthor
    18-Opal
    July 19, 2011
    Thanks, Gareth. I was thinking along similar lines. But I'm really
    really really hoping the solution doesn't require modifying the end
    users' Windows Appearance settings to replace the default UI font
    universally. I think that would pretty much be a non-starter.

    FWIW, my Vista system--which displays things correctly--shows Tahoma as
    the font for Windows menus in the Windows Appearance control panel.

    --Clay

    Clay Helberg
    Senior Consultant
    TerraXML
    E
    ebenton1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    July 19, 2011
    FWIW (probably little) the Wingdings 2 font shows character 0x52 as a checkbox with check.
    D
    DavidS.Taylor1-Visitor
    1-Visitor
    July 19, 2011
    On Windows 7 neither Segoe UI or Tahoma have a glyph for U+2611.

    Windows 7 does have the glyph in the Segoe UI Symbol font.

    Can you map to this font somehow?

    Cheers,

    David

    David S. Taylor

    Project Manager, Structured Information
    Institute for Research in Construction
    National Research Council Canada
    Bldg. M-23A, Room 239
    1200 Montreal Road, Ottawa, ON K1A 0R6

    Tel: +1.613.990.2731
    Fax: +1.613.952.4040
    Email: David.S.Taylor@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
    Web: www.irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca


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