Re: How to display symbolic fonts

From:

"Oliver Wong" <owong@castortech.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:48:47 GMT

Message-ID:

<jVZGg.14827$Ch.7288@clgrps13>

"Knute Johnson" <nospam@rabbitbrush.frazmtn.com> wrote in message
news:WRQGg.40509$k54.18390@newsfe11.phx...

Thomas Fritsch wrote:

"Knute Johnson" <nospam@rabbitbrush.frazmtn.com> wrote:

Oliver Wong wrote:

[...]

Additionally, rather than using a special font that maps musical
symbols to other characters, consider using the Unicode characters
specifically designed for this purpose:

Western Musical Symbols: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf
Byzantine Musical Symbols: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D000.pdf
Ancient Greek Musical Symbols:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D200.pdf

Oliver:

How do you represent a unicode value greater than 16 bits in a string?

"\u1D100" doesn't work.

new String(new int[] { 0x1D100 }, 0, 1)

Since Java 1.5 the String and Character class have some methods for
dealing with int-codepoints instead of just chars.
See also the API doc of String and Character (especially the methods with
"codePoint" in their name).

Thomas and John:

Thanks for the pointers. I've tried making Strings or char[] but still
cannot get them to display the supplemental characters. Is there an issue
with the font that I choose? Can you give me another hint?

    Font files are basically a collection of glyphs (drawings, if you
prefer) that the OS can use to paint on screen or on a printer to visually
represent the String data that you wish to display. The vast majority of
fonts I've seen do NOT have glyphs for every possible Unicode character.

    http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html is a handy reference to find
out which fonts have glyphs for what characters, and also allows you to test
your system to see if it can display certain characters.

    - Oliver