Fonts

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Glossary

  • Windows Intelligent Font Environment (WIFE): An operating system layer, introduced with the Far East editions of Windows 3, that manages multiple font technologies and font drivers that can be installed.
  • End-User Defined Character (EUDC): A special character, such as a rare ideograph, that the user creates with an editor and assigns to a code point within a reserved range.
  • Font association: The automatic pairing of a font that contains ideographs with a font that does not contain ideographs. This allows the user to enter ideographic characters regardless of which font is selected.

So that the user can take full advantage of the font capabilities he is accustomed to on Windows 3, Windows 95 supports font technologies governed by the Windows Intelligent Font Environment (WIFE), which was introduced with Windows 3. All existing font packages that use WIFE will work on Windows 95. Because TrueType fonts have been used as system defaults for Far East editions of Windows since Windows 3.1, however, Windows 95 will not install the WIFE module itself. New software, then, should use TrueType and should not assume that WIFE support will continue in the future. If you are a font vendor and require information on creating Far East TrueType fonts, please consult Microsoft's TrueType Open Specification, available through the Microsoft Developer Network (in the section titled "TrueType 1.0 Font Files").

Although the Japanese and Chinese code pages used by Windows each define thousands of characters, they exclude some rarely used ideographs. If a user or an application requires special ideographs—to spell the names of people or places, for example—they can be added to the system by creating End-User Defined Characters (EUDCs). Far East editions of Windows ship with an EUDC editor, which is similar to a paint program. (See Figure 7-25 below.) With this editor, the user can draw characters, assign them code-point values, and save them in TrueType font files. The user can also opt to buy third-party font packages that include EUDC characters.

Figure 7-25 The EUDC editor for Japanese Windows 95.

On Windows 3.1, EUDC characters were supported through WIFE, because TrueType did not support bitmapped fonts. On Windows 95, however, TrueType can support embedded bitmaps directly, and Windows 95's EUDC editor can create TrueType outline fonts. As described in Chapter 3, Windows NT maps the range of EUDC characters through Unicode's private-use zone. It does not store any character property information for EUDC characters. For more information on support for EUDC fonts in Windows 95, consult the SDK documentation.

When the user selects a font that covers only Latin characters, Windows 95 automatically selects a DBCS font for displaying any ideographs the user might type. For example, Chinese Windows 95 associates the MingLight font with fonts containing Latin 1 ANSI characters. This process, called font association, allows the user to enter ideographic characters regardless of which font is selected. Each Far East edition of Windows associates fonts differently, because each edition ships with different ideographic fonts. The user can override the system's default font associations by changing the appropriate values in the registry.