Calendar.font

[Guest]

In Vista, the glyph (typeFace) for code point x81 of Calendar.font (the Greek
char for pi) is different than the exact code point in WinXP. Is this an
intended effect?

If anybody knows which font in Vista contains such glypth, please advise.
- Thanks

 

[Andrew McLaren]

In Vista, the glyph (typeFace) for code point x81 of Calendar.font (the
Greek
char for pi) is different than the exact code point in WinXP. Is this an
intended effect?

It depends on the font. Most font files (eg *.ttf) contain just a subset of
Unicode characters; so whether a specific non-Latin character appears or not
various randomly from one font to the next. Also, chars in the range 128-255
tend to be pretty non-standard across fonts generally.

I guess you are referring to teh font used by the Calendar accessory in
Vista? Calendar uses the Tahoma font. Code poin 81 is blank in Tahoma; the
Unicode upper case Pi is at U+03A0 and lower case pi is at U+03C0. These are
the standard Unicode locations for Greek chars. If you look for Pi in these
locations, for any Unicode-supporting font, you won't go wrong.

XP didn't have any built-in Calendar accessory. What you saw on XP would
probably depend on the specific font used, by whatever application it was.

 

[Guest]

Andrew:
Thanks for the quick response.
I think this is more of a back compatibility issue w/ Vista.
Given Calculator font exists in both O/S, the issue here is with the
inconsistency of typeface at x81.
We found this during our Vista certification process of our existing
application. If this is a known or intended effect under Vista, then we may
need to change the current implementation to reference a different O/S
resources. Please advise.
Thanks,
Kenny

 

[Guest]

Andrew:
It is the Calculator.font that I am referring. Sorry for the typo.
- Kenny

 

[Andrew McLaren]

It is the Calculator.font that I am referring. Sorry for the typo.

Hi Kenny,

Thanks for the clarification - your question makes a bit more sense, now
that you are asking about Calculator, not Calendar!

But I am still not clear what problem you are seeing.

To input a value of pi into Calculator, you just press the "p" key on the
keyboard. This applies to both XP and Vista. No fonts or typefaces are
involved.

It may be obvious to you what problem you are seeing - but it's certainly
not obvious to me. Please explain, step-by-step, what you are doing and how
I can reproduce the problem.

The code position for lower-case pi in any Unicode font is U+03C0 (xF0). If
you are talking about any non-Unicode font, then you need to described
exactly the font and encoding you are using. Under Unicode, position x81 is
a blank contorl char; it is never pi. Are you using Unicode, ANSI or some
other single-byte font?

It's an interesting problem, so I hope you will get back to me.

 

[Guest]

Andrew:
This issue is not related to input method associated with Calc developed by
Microsoft.
To verify this issue, bring up charmap under WinXP and go directly to
codePoint x81; and compare what you see at WinXP with the charmap under Vista.
Specific to our issue, we have developed a proprietary calculator that
referenced the x81 code point of calculator.font. During a visual
inspection, the UI component that displaying the corresponding character
behaved different under Vista; than any pre-Vista Windows O/S.
Since the implementation depends on O/S resources, the inconsistency across
O/S creates an undued confusion with UI experience. In this case, the end
user may mistakenly interpret that pi function is disabled; while the
function is available & consistent.
Independent of this specific typeface issue, just don't know what the actual
scope of the problem is? And, what should be the preferred channel to
escalate this to Microsoft regarding this incompatibility issue.
Hope you can shed some light on this.
Thanks,
Kenny

 

[Andrew McLaren]

To verify this issue, bring up charmap under WinXP and go directly to
codePoint x81; and compare what you see at WinXP with the charmap under
Vista.

Which font have you selected in the Charmap Font dropdown list? Different
fonts can put different glyphs at a given code point, so what appears at x81
depends on which font you have selected. I don't know what you mean by
"calculator.font". Are your to referring to a specific Font; such as a
*.TTF or *.fon file? If so, which one? (eg Arial, Batang, Courier New?). Is
it one of the fonts supplied with Windows? Is it a Unicode Font? Or is it a
codepage-based font, like ANSI or Shift_JIS?

For the Arial and Tahoma fonts, in both XP and Vista, Char 129 (x81) is
"Latin Captal N with Tilde".

For the Courier and System fonts, in both XP and Vista, Char 129 (x81) is an
unprintable control char.

O/S creates an undued confusion with UI experience. In this case, the end
user may mistakenly interpret that pi function is disabled; while the
function is available & consistent.

If you are using Unicode, the standard position for lower-case pi is U+03C0.
This is the *only* code point which is guaranteed to remain constant across
all languages, fonts, codepages and cultures. If you are working in an
multilingual environment, or with double-byte languages (eg East Asian
languages) I strongly recomend you use Unicode. Windows NT (including NT
4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista) all use Unicode as their "native"
internal encoding.

If you are not using Unicode, then you must specify the font and Codepage
you are using, for the question to make any sense. Characters from 0 to 127
are pretty standard (they follow 7-bit ASCII). Characters on the 8th bit
(from 128-255) vary according to the code page and font file in use.

On a world scale, it is quite unusual to find lower-case pi at position 129.
I don't know which character set which uses that encoding. If you are
explaining this problem to other people, you will need to be ready to give
them a LOT of information about the language, code page, font, encoding, etc
you are using.

And, what should be the preferred channel to
escalate this to Microsoft regarding this incompatibility issue.

I would love to help you with this problem, but you have not given me enough
detail.

If you cannot describe the problem in more detail here, you should open a
Service Request with Microsoft Product Support Services ("PSS"). You can
find teh contact details for PSS in your country, here:
http://support.microsoft.com/common/international.aspx
In most countries, you need to pay. If you are part of a large company of an
ISV, you may have an existing support contract with Microsoft.

 

[Guest]

Now, I am a bit confused myself because I could not locate this Calculator
font at my home PC(WinXP). I was able to find this Calculator font within
our organization - more 10 PCs(both on WinXP & Vista). I will validate if
this is a proprietary font or if this is an extended font set of Windows. I
will get back to you for closure.

I appreciate your help thus far.
- Kenny