What determines the character range displayed in Windows' Character Map utility?

Adam Jagosz
Adam Jagosz Posts: 689
in Font Technology
What decides about the character range displayed in Character Map? For fonts shipping with the OS, only characters having glyphs in them are displayed. For at least some custom fonts, I see U+0021 to U+FFFE which is kind of pointless.
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Comments

  • Theunis de Jong
    Theunis de Jong Posts: 112
    edited October 2018
    An application has to believe the information that is provided by the font file itself. If a font claims to contain 65,000 characters, then any application will assume it actually does. If all of those entries then map to space (or really anything else), that is a different issue.

    Name a font that exhibits such behavior (preferably a free/open source one...) and I'll take a look at its encoding. That ought to tell everything.
  • Adam Jagosz
    Adam Jagosz Posts: 689
    edited October 2018
    Trickster would be an example.
    Btw the reason I ask this is because all of my fonts exported from FontForge display this behavior as well, no matter what encoding I set.
    A third party Character Map replacement I found in Windows Store doesn't behave this way with the fonts affected in the default Win app.
  • Erwin Denissen
    Erwin Denissen Posts: 310
    This problem seems to be related to fonts with Compact Font Format (CFF) based outlines.

    A decent font manager like MainType will show the exact character set.



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