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Re: Adobe Acrobat ASCII fronts

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jan 15, 2013 9:50AM

Whew. There's a lot to address in your short question, Mike.
I'm an expert for Acrobat and InDesign, so if you can send me sample INDD
and PDF files, I'll take a look at the problem and give you my assessment.

Now the details:

1. Never heard of "ASCII fonts." Was a typesetter 40 years ago and now have
a 35,000+ font collection so there's a good chance I'd own them if they
existed.

You might mean the lower 128 standard characters that form the base set of
glyphs on Western European fonts, namely a b c (lowercase), A B C
(uppercase), 1 2 3 (numeric), and punctuation...the characters we can easily
type on our keyboards. Long ago (1960s I believe) they were called the
ASCII/ANSI standard computer character set and later were nicknamed
"Alt-Characters" because you type them using the keyboard's ALT-key plus a
4-digit character number.

From my firm's online archives, here's a chart of those characters (plus
some of the "upper" characters, that is, above 128) that I created in 1986:
http://www.pubcom.com/downloads/Character-Chart.pdf They represent a common
chart of characters available on PostScript and TrueType fonts, which were
limited to a maximum of approximately 216 characters. (My apologies to this
list, but this archived reference chart is not accessible.)

Do not confuse these fonts with today's OpenType fonts which are based on
the Unicode standard and can contain up to approximately 65,000 fonts (and
more). However, the base 128 characters are the same on western European
text fonts regardless of whether they are old PostScript/TrueType or new
OpenType.

2. Segue into the next topic. Note that I said "Text" fonts in the paragraph
above. Example: character #0110 on a text font will be the lowercase "n" but
that same character number is used on the Wingdings symbol font to represent
a black square box (or bullet). See the online character chart above for
comparison of several fonts.

(Note to screen reader users: if you've ever wondered why you hear "n" in a
document, it's probably representing a bullet character on a symbol font.
There are many other bullet symbols, but this is the most commonly used
one.)

This is a conflict between the conventional method of typesetting in Word
and InDesign (font number + font name = the character I want to render) and
what accessibility software needs (a unique character number for each and
every symbol/character/glyph known to mankind regardless of what font is
used).

3. There is some development in the computer industry to address this
conflict, but it's not a hot topic. It affects not only accessibility, but
also cross-media publishing where "content" moves from Word to a database to
websites, PDFs, InDesign, mobile devices, RSS feeds, etc. Usually some form
of XML is involved in this.

My firm is in the process of developing recommendations for special font
characters and you can view a very rough, preliminary test here:
http://www.pubcom.com/unicode-font-test/ Our current recommendation is to
use column 4 "Hexadecimal" (in yellow) as these represent the newer Unicode
values. (Note: this is a test page and was not intended to be publicly
accessible.)

4. Regardless of what character you type, assistive technology manufacturers
are responsible for interpreting it correctly to their users. Today's screen
readers do not do an adequate job of this. If I was a screen reader user,
I'd be very angry with the lack of concern about font characters.

Hope this helps,
- Bevi Chagnon
<EMAIL REMOVED>
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