[Mapserver-dev] Wingdings bug

[Daniel Morissette]

Ned Harding wrote:
> I found a post that said that Wingdings and other TrueType fonts that are
> not Unicode don't work, but...  A little research in the debugger diving
> down into the FreeType library found that the WingDings characters are
> mapped into the range of 0xf000 to 0xf0ff.  If you simply add 61440 to a
> character code, it works just fine, i.e.    CHARACTER "" maps to the
> star (0xAB).  This works fine in a kludgy kind of way, but violates my sense
> of style.
> 
> I'm not familiar enough with the mapServer code base and all the libraries
> to fix this bug.  Any ideas what piece of code should be responsible for
> mapping these characters up into this range?  I'm guessing that the bug is
> in the GD library, but again, I'm not really sure.
> 

It's not really a bug, it's just that wingding isn't a text font, it's a 
symbol font, and for this reason the character codes had to be mapped to 
a non-reserved area of the character map.

I found the following post which explains that: 
http://www.freetype.org/pipermail/freetype/2001-July/004164.html

MapServer is just taking whatever input we provide and passing it to 
freetype, so I'm not sure we can/should do anything about this unless we 
want to add handling of character encodings everywhere in MapServer.

Daniel
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  Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
  DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
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