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Symbol characters in custom menus?

ClayHelberg
18-Opal

Symbol characters in custom menus?

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 4

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:

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

FWIW (probably little) the Wingdings 2 font shows character 0x52 as a checkbox with check.

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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