Give me a break [Char] !

re: Give me a break [Char] !

Michael S. Kaplan — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 19:29:47 GMT

A comment was accidentally deleted, someone asking about what CTRL+BACKSPACE was adding in Notepad -- it is U+007f (everyone's favorite backspace control character, of course!)....

re: Give me a break [Char] !

Gabe — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:15:54 GMT

I'm not sure it even makes sense to have this as a characteristic of a font. Shouldn't it be per-language or per-script?

re: Give me a break [Char] !

Andrew West — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:29:31 GMT

Googling desperately for a solution to a problem with a font I have just created, I find that all roads lead back to SiaO!

I've just created a font that, for reasons I'd best leave unexplained, has a non-blank glyph for U+0020. My problem is that when I type text using the font in Notepad everything is fine as long as I just type alphabetic letters (a..z, A..Z and space), but as soon as I type any other character (e.g. a comma) my space glyph suddenly appears overlaying the first character on the line. And in Word 2003, my space glyph always appears at the end of every line whatever I type (even blank lines). I guessed that this must be because Windows was displaying my space glyph as the "break character", but when I changed the value of usBreakChar in the OS/2 table from "32" (i.e. U+0020) to "84" (i.e. U+0054, which is blank in my font ... because "T" is blank) there is no change in behaviour, and the glyph for U+0020 continues to be used for the break character. Which I guess indicates that the actual value of usBreakChar is being ignored, and probably a hard-coded glyph index is being used :-(

The solution which I am going to try this evening is to give U+0020 a blank glyph, and put the space glyph somewhere else; then add in a GSUB table that unconditionally substitutes the blank space glyph with my actual space glyph -- just hope it works.

Or an alternative solution worth trying might be to make glyph id 3 blank but not mapped to U+0020, and instead map U+0020 to a non-blank glyph elsewhere in the font. Either way, it's a bit annoying to have to use hacks to get a non-blank space character.

re: Give me a break [Char] !

Andrew West — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:30:36 GMT

Just in case anyone is interested, the OpenType solution works (at least with apps that support OpenType features), but my alternative solution does not, as it appears from experimentation that the glyph that is mapped to U+0020 is always used as the break character, whatever its glyph ID, and regardless of the value of usBreakChar.