Quirks in menu display with Wimp special characters

One of my systems happens to be using Sassoon.Primary as its desktop font. Seems OK in normal use other than when the Window Manager tries to render the up-arrow glyph to represent Shift e.g. Shift-F3 in Netsurf’s File menu (or variously in PipeDream 4 menus), it displays the character ‘J’ as the prefix to ‘F3’.

Selecting Corpus.Medium as the desktop font doesn’t show anything as a prefix!

Homerton.Medium is of course fine as always.

This is RO 5.29 (13-Dec-2022) with Country UK configured and in use, not anything perverse.

A quick look with Chars shows that Sassoon has a ‘J’ at &8B whereas other fonts have nothing. By way of light entertainment an “otf Sassoon download”;https://www.wfonts.com/font/sassoon was converted into RISC OS with TTF2F which got rid of the ‘J’ in NetSurf and the totally excellent PipeDream.

A quick look with Chars shows that Sassoon has a ‘J’ at &8B

I could have sworn that Chars on that system didn’t show me anything in that range a couple of hours ago…

Ha. Seems to have been noticed as early as 2007 https://www.freelists.org/post/iyonix-support/Desktop-font-and-WimpSymbol,2

Seems to have been noticed as early as 2007

And quite right too, “Safeguarding the past”.

Interesting post. The Sassoon created here yesterday from an otf file with TTF2f 0.07 does have an Encoding file whereas the original doesn’t.

OTOH I do rather like Exo.Regular.Italic for the Desktop. Sassoon was a bit small at the default size of 12pt, a tweak of Wimp$FontSize might have helped.

Well, that rabbit hole was interesting at a short glance.

Font > Unicode > BMP > Plane

Happy with the TTF2F converted one, even tho I accidentally called it Sassoon.Primark. :-) [Edit: not really; it doesn’t have a hard space, so menus look rubbish. Attempting to clone space as hard space using FontEd I borked the system so it wouldn’t boot.] [Edit2: Exo doesn’t have a hard space either.]

Can someone with font competence knock up a suitable Encoding file to go with the EFF Sassoon.Primary for use with RISC OS 5?

I see that there is https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/2412 but that modified Encoding didn’t work here.

Sassoon.Primark. :-) [Edit: it doesn’t have a hard space, so menus look rubbish]

Hmm! My, full price, Sassoon.Primary as converted here does have a space at 160 and PipeDream’s menus do show that.

Exo doesn’t have a hard space either

So it doesn’t. I was rather liking that, oh well!!

My, full price, Sassoon.Primary as converted here does have a space at 160

So it does! Thank you. My ttf2f must be defective. Or something.

Exo doesn’t have a hard space either

The Exo downloadable from PlingStore doesn’t, either.

A newly converted Exo from here also has the hard space. To avoid confusion I’ve temporarily called it ExoTest

I am using TTF2f 0.07 (27-May-2022)

A newly converted Exo from here also has the hard space. To avoid confusion I’ve temporarily called it ExoTest

Thanks

I am using TTF2f 0.07 (27-May-2022)

As am I…

Hah! When converted here Sassoon-Primary.otf (from https://www.wfonts.com/font/sassoon) doesn’t have hard space defined but SassoonSansStd-Medium.otf does.

Hah! When converted here Sassoon-Primary.otf (from https://www.wfonts.com/font/sassoon) doesn’t have hard space defined but SassoonSansStd-Medium.otf does.

Well spotted, I had been using sassoonprimarystd.otf. Odd, some does, some doesn’t.

This is a bit empirical.

Using FontEd for both the IntMetrics and Outlines files drag Space to the empty NBSP and save both. Define 160 as space in Encoding. Reboot.

I have the hard space in both Sassoon.Primary and Sassoon.Primary.Std.

Using FontEd for both the IntMetrics and Outlines files drag Space to the empty NBSP and save both.

That is indeed what I was attempting to do the other day – but silly me still had that font selected as Desktop font at the time! Stuart’s top tip: select A.N.Other Desktop font first or your system is borked.

silly me still had that font selected as Desktop font at the time! Stuart’s top tip: select A.N.Other Desktop font first or your system is borked.

Cut not the branch upon which thou art sitting…
Anyone not done that silly trick?

A final aside on the Desktop font – I have been using Cabin for a week and love it.

One small quirk with using Sassoon as the desktop font showed up when using Boot.Install<code> to update <code>!Boot.

Error from Boot Merge: Resources.!Fonts.Sassoon.Primary: This file is already open

My modified Sassoon has been renamed to avoid that and preserve it over updates.