And the prize for the most specialised Zap font goes to...

Sadly, I no longer have a copy of the Zap font we used at the Physiological Society journals office. That was pretty specialized – you can see the vector version of it at http://clive.semmens.org.uk/024_ROUGOL/06j_JPhysFont.jpg – the Zap version followed it almost exactly. (The Fonted display of the vector version isn’t using the corresponding Zap font for the bitmaps, sadly – I only produced that image long after the loss of the Zap font.)

I can do all that with my Unicode font, but I don’t recognise the double chevrons out of black circles (at least I don’t think I do). What were they for?

Edit: Actually there’s some superscript weirdness too. Is that a superscript minus with a subscript digit on the left?

The double chevrons out of black circles were characters that were cancelled (they had a usage that the editors decided to ban), fitted with black circles so no-one could use them by mistake! 8-)

The superscript weirdness was because various combinations such as superior 2+, superior +, and superior -, all with or without inferior l.c. i or o directly beneath them, were so common that we had a single alt-shift-character for them on the keyboard, and treated them as a single character – here’s the keyboard layout: http://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/JPhysiolKB.html

If I was doing a similar thing today, I’d probably use much the same keyboard layout, but make it issue a string of Unicode characters (with probably some "kerning"* & possibly font size info interspersed) rather than using a non-standard font – assuming I had that much control over my keyboard driver! But that was 1993… and I’m DEFINITELY not doing anything similar these days anyway.

* I use the term kerning rather loosely, following the Impression usage.

I so want to write a fully configurable keyboard handler, but I’ve been so busy since <checks watch> 1998.

I don’t know how many others would appreciate it, but I certainly would. Not for specialized academic journal production – not done that since 1997 – but for typing in foreign languages, particularly Hindi.