[Mapserver-dev] Wingdings bug

[Ned Harding]

Thanks for looking into that Daniel...  I guess it seams like a FreeType
issue, in that the behavior is different from the windows TrueType renderer,
but mainly a bug that isn't a bug.  Not too big an issue now that I've
figured it out.  It only became an issue for me because I'm embedding
MapServer into a desktop product on windows and I have to make do with what
fonts a client will have.

Ned.

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Morissette [mailto:morissette at dmsolutions.ca] 
Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 8:23 AM
To: Ned Harding
Cc: mapserver-dev at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: Re: [Mapserver-dev] Wingdings bug


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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