Fonts for Wawa Thanks

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Hi, George.  Well, back in the WordPerfect days one could "construct"
characters (like a barred-L, say) by overstriking them.  It was
relatively quick and easy to do (as so many things were in WP in the
hands of an experienced operator--sigh).  I managed to construct the
German double S (essen, I think it's called) for a printer which
lacked the character by overstriking a lower L with a 3 (I
think--maybe it was a P and a 3--it was a long time ago).  It looked
close enough when printed.  This was back before TrueType and such
exotica as Adobe Type 1 fonts and utilities weren't yet found in the
usual office.

Anyway, it took me a while to figure out how to do this in Word.  I
needed to recreate the odd and unique symbols Shaw used in his
Pronouncing Vocabulary.  (The printer must have shaved a lot of lead
to construct these things; some of the more erratically placed
accents appear to have been simply scratched into the offset plate.)

I found that you can highlight a character, choose "Format," "Font,"
"Character spacing," then change "Normal" to "Condensed," and enter a
point value.  The following character will overlap.  The overlapping
character might also need spacing adjustment.

Shaw also used an a and a g with a single dot below, and an a and an
o with double dots below, which I couldn't find in any font I had.
Constructing these vertically offset things require a further step.
For these, after doing the sideways-overlap trick, I highlighted the
gizmo, went to format/font, selected "lower," and entered a
sufficient value in points to bring the dot or the umlaut under the
character.

This forces the following line much lower, though, as Word allows
space for the full height of the character which was lowered in the
line above.  This is overcome, however, by setting a fixed line
height for the paragraph. ("Format," "Paragraph," "Indents and
Spacing," "Line Spacing," select "exact" and enter a point value.)  

After doing this enough times to believe I had it about right, I made
a keyboard-shortcut macro to construct these characters as I
proceeded.  I left adjusting the line height until I had the section
finished, and then just did it all at once.

Since these tricks are done in Word by changing spacing in points,
you have to do it with the page set in the specific fonts and font
sizes of the finished work, as blowing up or reducing the page or
adjusting the fonts will throw the scheme off.  But it's better than
nada.

P.S. Other possible sources of odd characters can be found in the
fonts on the MS Office CD ("Bookshelf Symbol"), and if you have a
computer version of the American Heritage Dictionary (or probably
anything similar), it installs a couple fonts of its own with many
pronouncing symbols.

P.P.S.  Anybody know how to search/replace an en space or em space in
Word?  These can be inserted into text from a menu, but I can't find
any way to enter them in the search box.

Regards,

Jeff

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002 12:19:20 -0500, George Lang
<george.lang at UALBERTA.CA> wrote:
>
>My kingdom for a few glyphs...
>
>George