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Vista Symbols

Vista includes more fonts and more symbols that you can insert into documents than ever before. In addition, the Arial Unicode MS font, which is preinstalled with Microsoft Office on many PCs, offers a huge assortment of symbols and character sets from around the world.

Getting the Symbols You Want To enter graphical symbols into your documents in Vista, it’s no longer necessary to switch to Symbol, an old-style font that has only about 220 distinct characters. The Windows core fonts - including Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New - now support 1,000 to 2,000 characters. This acccomodates every European language as well as providing many pictorial symbols. If you can’t find the symbol you want in a core font, Vista provides the Wingdings, Webdings, and Lucida Sans Unicode fonts.

Wingdings and

Webdings have been included with the operating system since Windows 3.1 and Windows 98, respectively. These two fonts, like Symbol, also support only about 220 designs, but several of them are offbeat images that may be exactly what you’re looking for.

Lucida Sans Unicode is a wide-ranging collection of characters and symbols that has been included in the OS since Windows 95. With the introduction of Windows 2000, Lucida Sans Unicode grew to encompass some 1,776 characters. That number has risen only slightly to date, so almost anyone who’s installed a version of Windows since 2000 will have the same Lucida characters that Vista users do. For the ultimate in language and symbology support, Microsoft provides a giant font called Arial Unicode MS. This font, which is currently over 22MB in size, includes more than 50,000 shapes representing about 39,000 different characters. At this writing, Arial Unicode MS is not included with Vista but is loaded by default when you install Microsoft Office 2000 or higher. Because many PCs today come with Office preinstalled, the characters present in Arial Unicode MS are available to a large number of Windows users. article A-1 shows a tiny sampling of the symbols you can insert into your documents using the Vista and Office fonts described previously.

When It’s Safe to Use Your Fonts A great deal of information about which fonts are present in different versions of Windows - and how best to use them - is presented earlier in this article in Article 7. In this appendix, we’ll just quickly review a few rules of thumb. And we’ll plunge into a few figures that show you which symbols are available to you as a Vista user. You can safely use any font in Vista if you observe the following guidelines:

1. Print-only documents. If you plan to distribute only hard copies of your documents, and you don’t expect anyone other than yourself to be editing the files, you can use any font and any character you wish. If you can see the character on your screen, and it prints correctly on your printer, that’s all that matters.

2. Adobe PDF files. If you have Adobe Acrobat or an alternative program that creates PDF (Portable Document Format) files, you can also use any font or character you wish. The PDF technology automatically saves the outlines of any fonts used in a document. This makes the document display and print the same way on the computers of other people you distribute the file to. (Widely used “core” fonts, such as Arial, are exceptions that are sometimes not included in PDF files. But, at your option, you can require the inclusion of even these fonts. In Acrobat, click Advanced -> Acrobat Distiller -> Settings -> Edit Adobe PDF Settings -> Fonts -> Embed All Fonts.)

3. Sharing .doc files. If you want other people to be able to edit a document that you’ve created using noncore fonts, you have two choices. You can make sure that your associates are all using the same version of Windows that you are. This makes it very likely that they’ll also have the same fonts and characters on their PCs that you do. Or you can save all the fonts you use within the document itself so others are guaranteed to have all the same characters you do. To do this in Microsoft Word, click Tools -> Options -> Save -> Embed TrueType Fonts. Embedding a font makes your file take up more space on disk, but it’s usually worth it to prevent editing problems. (To reduce the disk-space requirements, the Embed TrueType Fonts check box allows you to save only those characters you actually use in a document. This reduced character set, however, makes it impossible for other people to edit the document and include characters you didn’t use, if they don’t have the same fonts installed.)

4. Posting documents on the Web. If you use the correct methods, you can safely include special characters in articles that you post on the Web. The trick is to specify characters above decimal 127 using an HTML feature called numbered entities. For example, don’t insert an em dash ( - ) into your writing by entering character number 150. This only displays properly in Windows, not in Macs or Linux. Instead, make sure your HTML code uses the Unicode decimal value of the em dash, which is 8212, in an encoded entity like this: — All modern Web browsers, at least since version 4.0 of the Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers and version 1.0 of Firefox, will convert a numbered entity into the desired character as long as any font present on the visitor’s machine supports that character. This means that you don’t have to know every font that your visitors may have installed. As long as you use a character that’s present in a core font or in Lucida Sans Unicode, 99 percent of Web surfers will be able to see it. The preceding comments about embedding fonts into PDF and DOC files assume that the particular fonts you’re using don’t prohibit embedding. Fortunately, most of the fonts provided by Vista do allow embedding. If you’ve purchased fonts from other sources, however, check that they’re “embeddable” or, even better, “editable.” If not, don’t assume these fonts can be saved within your PDF and DOC files. It’s easy to check whether a given font is “editable” (it allows whoever opens the file to enter new characters from the embedded font) or merely “embeddable” (it allows whoever opens the file to see all same characters in whichever font you originally used). To do this, open the Fonts control panel, right-click a font name, click Properties, and select the Details tab. The Font Embeddability line will show you the font’s status.

Entering Special Characters

Many applications have their own unique methods that allow you to enter special characters into documents. Microsoft Word, for example, supports an Insert -> Symbol command. This enables you to select any character you wish from within a list of all installed fonts. The following method, however, works the same way in almost all Windows applications, regardless of who developed them. It involves holding down the Alt key while you enter a decimal number on your numeric keypad.

Entering Characters Using Alt+number

1. In your application, select a font that contains the character you wish to insert.

2. Make sure NumLock is on (the NumLock light is lighted).

3. Hold down your Alt key.

4. Type the decimal number of the character on your numeric keypad. (This even works on laptops with no numeric keypad, as long as they have a NumLock key and numerals that are printed on alphabetical characters on the keyboard.)

5. Release the Alt key. The desired character should instantly appear. For example, to enter an em dash into text, hold down Alt and type 8212 on your numeric keypad. (This is usually written “Alt+8212.”) Vista’s core fonts and most of the other fonts will display a dash at your cursor location as soon as you release the Alt key.

The Leading Zero Is No Longer Needed Windows users have long used the Alt+number method to enter special characters. Alt+0169, for example, accesses a copyright symbol in most fonts. Vista eliminates the need to enter a leading zero in front of the rest of the number. Any decimal number may now be entered by holding down Alt, typing the number on the numeric keypad, and releasing Alt. Alt+169, for example, is all that’s needed to get a copyright symbol. In previous versions of Windows, using the Alt+number method to enter a number between 128 and 255 without the leading zero resulted in the insertion of a character from the old DOS upper-ANSI character set - but no longer. What if you forget to switch to the appropriate font before entering the character number - or it turns out that the font you selected doesn’t in fact support that character? Most applications allow you to select a different font for specified text even after you’ve entered it. The Alt+number method, unfortunately, is somewhat dependent on the specific input language that’s in effect when you’re typing. For example, Alt+number works in the English (United States) input language but not in every input language that can be used by Windows. Check your input language. To find out which input language Vista is using, open the Regional and Language Options control panel. In the Keyboards and Languages tab, click the Change Keyboards button. Your default input language should be shown.

Entering Characters Using CharMap If the Alt+number method doesn’t work for you, a technique that always works is to use CharMap.exe. This little accessory allows you to scroll through the entire character set of any installed font. You can then pick characters using the Select button, copy them to the Clipboard using the Copy button, and finally paste them into your word-processing application. Your pasted characters should retain their font information, just as they appeared in CharMap. To launch CharMap, click Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Character Map. Or enter

charmap.exe in the search bar. article A-2 shows an example of using ChapMap to select the copyright symbol (Alt+169).

Apps That Help You Pick Your Fonts Some Vista applications will actually help you find a character you enter, if that character isn’t present in your currently selected font. Try this in WordPad, for instance: Change the current font to Lucida Sans Unicode. Enter Alt+9398 to insert a circled letter “A.” Without warning, WordPad switches the current font to SimSun and inserts a circled “A,” because Lucida doesn’t contain that symbol but SimSun does. You’ll need to manually switch back to your base font if you don’t want to use SimSun (a font widely used in China) for the rest of your document.

Choosing the Right Font for the Job When entering symbols, selecting a font that’s “low on the food chain” will reduce any potential problems if you want to allow others to open and edit your document. Look for the characters you want in the following kinds of fonts, from the most prevelent to the least:

1. Use “core” fonts first. If you can find a desired symbol in Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier New, select one of these fonts. Almost all users of Windows, Macs, and Linux have versions of these fonts installed.

2. Use Lucida Sans Unicode when needed. This font has been present by default in Windows since version 98 and most Windows users will therefore have it installed. If Mac or Linux users will be receiving your document, however, they may not have Lucida available. In that case, distribute your document only with Lucida embedded when you save the file.

3. Use Wingdings or Webdings sparingly. Only Windows users typically have these fonts installed. So use them only if necessary, and always embed them when you do. articles A-3 and A-4 show the symbols available in Wingdings and Webdings, respectively. If possible, use instead the characters in the Dingbats range of Unicode: hex 2700 to 27BF.

4. Use Arial Unicode MS when necessary. Even many Windows users don’t have this font handy, because it’s currently installed only by Microsoft Office 2000 and higher. Even so, others can see and edit your document - including even the most offbeat Unicode characters - if, when you save the file, you embed the characters that you used. Be aware that Arial Unicode MS is over 22MB by itself, so embedding the entire font can enormously increase the size of your files.

The Benefits of Unicode

Unicode is an international standard, first published in 1991, that now defines more than 100,000 different characters, ideograms, and symbols from almost every language group in the world. The decimal and hexadecimal values of the characters shown in this appendix are the same as the values specified in Unicode. The standardization of these language groups’ symbols - known as glyphs - is a huge boon for communication. Microsoft is a strong supporter of Unicode. Files saved in Windows are now stored using an encoding of Unicode called UTF-8. This encoding ensures that the characters in a disk file will remain stable regardless of the various input languages that may be selected on a computer at any given time. We haven’t attempted to include every known Unicode character here. Entire articles that document the standard - including tens of thousands of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ideograms - are available from the Unicode Consortium at www.unicode.org. In this article, Article 7 includes a chart of some of the Unicode characters available in Arial and Times New Roman. In this appendix, by contrast, article A-5 is a chart showing useful symbols that are found in Lucida Sans Unicode and Arial Unicode MS. We show a column for each character in both of those fonts because the appearance sometimes differs notably between the two. Also, some symbols appear only in one font and not the other. This is indicated by a blank space in one font’s column. The position of a character in the Unicode scheme is often represented using a number, as follows: U+20AC, for instance, for a euro sign (decimal 8364). We simply show in our charts the decimal and hex values without tacking on the “U+” indicator. Also, the Unicode Consortium usually specifies the names of defined characters in all caps. For legibility’s sake, we’ve written out the character names for you in upper- and lowercase, although the all-cap version is technically more correct. In no way do we believe that we’ve shown here every character that might possibly be useful to you. Also, please note that the charts we’ve designed for this article were created using a beta version of Windows Vista. Characters that weren’t included in the Vista fonts then may have become a part of those fonts by the time you read this or shortly thereafter. As always, be sure to test any characters and fonts you wish to include in a document before relying on those characters to be there. Have fun using these characters! The only limit is your imagination.