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Character Sets
Operating systems like Macintosh, Windows and Amiga often only support a character set of 256 characters, each allocated a system number from 0-255 (although some numbers are reserved for special printing/display-terminal functions like carriage return and line feed). The operating system associates a default, predefined character (or, 'glyph') to each displayable system number depending on the language being supported. (The glyphs for letters A-Z and a-z and the numerals 0-9 are allocated in the system number range of 48-112 along with some punctuation marks for operating systems intended to display this page.) The appearance, or font style, of the individual glyphs can be changed by selecting an alternative font style (e.g. 'Times'). However, some fonts do not have glyphs defined for all of the displayable operating system character numbers.
PageStream supports many more than 256 characters (glyphs) because it represents characters in document files by using the Unicode character set (an international standard with a potential of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of characters).
In order for Pagestream to display the document characters on the screen, send them to a printer or create a PDF file, it has to translate from the Unicode number in the file to the appropriate system number for the operating system and language being used. This applies to both printable and non-printable characters such as names of variables, style tags, and element names. If ''a'' dialog box is used to change, for example, a style tag, Pagestream has to translate the characters selected in ''the'' dialog box (and therefore conforming to the operating system character set) into Unicode before inserting them as non-printable characters into the document file. The same is true of printable text typed into Pagestream text frames and boxes.
Pagestream allows you to insert any Unicode character into a document (see, Inserting Special Characters ). However, if that character is not included in the operating system character set, then PageStream will do one of two things,
- If the unsupported character is to be displayed in the document window, printed to a printer, or saved in a PDF file; PageStream will use either mnemonically generated characters (See, inserting special characters using mnemonics ), or a similar character selected from the operating system character set (for instance, one without the accent of the original Unicode glyph). Please note that, if the alternative character selected by Pagestream is not defined in the chosen font, no character will appear.
<screen shot of Unicode verses similar operating system character> - If the missing character is to be displayed in ''a'' dialog box, PageStream will instead display the numerical value of that character preceded by a \. The same format may be used to enter characters, as well, but the \ character must be entered with a preceding \. (i.e., to enter the '\' character, the characters '\\' must be typed into ''the'' dialog box)
<screen shot of example here>
PageStream's supported character sets consist of built in support for Amiga, Linux (UTF-8), Macintosh, MS DOS, and Windows characters, with additional character sets stored in an ascii format in individual files in the SoftLogik/CSets folder.
Character Set File Format
Character Sets Section url:PGSuser/charactersets
created:2006-03-10 16:50:22 last updated:2006-08-13 12:57:27
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