Font Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Galt
  • Start date Start date
J

John Galt

This question came about as a result of a printing issue in Excel, but it's
actually a very general question about truetype fonts, which seem to be an
OS-related matter, so here I am.

In trying to get an ampersand to print in Excel headers (they don't) I
wanted to try the ASCII-code for the character to see if that would work. I
used a character mapping software package to try to determine what the ASCII
character would be. And I came up with a big blank. Every other character
was mapped, but never ampersands, not for any truetype font!

Any idea why this is?
 
John said:
This question came about as a result of a printing issue in Excel, but it's
actually a very general question about truetype fonts, which seem to be an
OS-related matter, so here I am.

In trying to get an ampersand to print in Excel headers (they don't) I
wanted to try the ASCII-code for the character to see if that would work. I
used a character mapping software package to try to determine what the ASCII
character would be. And I came up with a big blank. Every other character
was mapped, but never ampersands, not for any truetype font!

Any idea why this is?
Click to expand...

I can't yet think of what might be wrong with your setup, but when use
XP's "charmap.exe" program, I can see tha that the & character is
defined in TrueType fonts (at least the couple for which I did spot
check). Check "charmap" and see for yourself on your machine.
 
Thanks Rob. The "character code" that it shows -- how does that correspond
to an ASCII code? For some windows apps (although apparently not MS ones
that use their own proprietary "insert characters" features), I hold down
the ALT key and type in the ASCII code. So the ASCII code is what I'm after.
Does that make sense?
 
John

In A1 enter =CHAR(ROW()) and drag down to A256.

Excel will return the ascii characters for 1 to 256 in Column A.

You will find that 38 is the ampersand(&)

OR type & into a cell then =CODE(cellref) to return 38

ALT + 0038 on the NUMBER PAD will return the ampersand.

BTW, your printing question was answered over in the Excel NG.

Gord Dibben Excel MVP - XL97 SR2 & XL2002
 
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