How does Elixir map AFP fonts to PC-based (ASCII) fonts? |
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converting an AFP-font to Elixir's SCREEN and/or HP-PCL format, two things must occur: the
character set must be limited to a maximum of 256 characters and the characters must be
mapped to PC keyboard positions. To accomplish this, the Elixir converter goes through a
2-step process (in this example, the bounded box coded font name is X0A0757C and the only
conversion option selected is SCREEN). a) In the first step, the Elixir font converter looks into the coded font (X0A0757C) and finds the character set (C0A07570) and code page referenced (T1DCDCFS). It will then look in the code page and find all of the GCIDs listed. Next, it looks in the character set and ONLY extracts the character bitmaps that it can find a GCID match for (this is necessary because AFP character sets can consist of more than 256 characters - some have over 600). b) In the second step, the converter needs to place the bitmaps into the proper locations for use with a PC keyboard. To do this, it looks in a keyboard map file (.KMP extension found in \ELIXIR\FONTS\MAPS). The .KMP file consists of a series of pairs of PC hexadecimal locations and GCIDs. The converter takes each GCID (and the associated character bitmap) it found in the code page, looks in the .KMP for a match and then maps the character referred to by that GCID to the hexadecimal location found in the .KMP. The resulting file created is referred to as the PC MAPPED (or ASCII-MAPPED) font. In the example we are currently looking at, the PC MAPPED font is a temporary file that is used to build the SCREEN font. It is then discarded. |
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