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Transmitting User Characters

Electronic Document Transmission

Transmitting User Characters

If you use user characters(4- 10) from your user font(4- 12) in a document, you should keep in mind that others you wish to share your work with will not have the characters you have created unless you send them as well. To ensure that recipients can view your document with all user characters correctly displayed, as you intended, you should transmit the document with an embedded proxy font(9- 1). Otherwise, the recipient will see blank, or worse, incorrect characters.

Embedded Proxy Font

Smart Characters can automatically extract the user characters(4- 10) used from a particular user font(4- 12) into a proxy font(D- - 6), and embed the proxy font into the document in Ascii format.

A proxy font contains a copy of the user characters used in a particular document, so that the user font itself does not need to be transmitted. The proxy font is not referred to directly, but rather indirectly via references to the substituted user font. Whenever Smart Characters encounters a character in the substituted user font, it substitutes the same character from the proxy font. Whatever user fonts are installed are not used. The substitution from user to proxy is automatically performed according to a concordance(D- - 2) between the proxy and the original user font. The concordance is created when the original document is saved and saved in the proxy font itself.

Creating a Proxy Font

To create and embed a proxy font(D- - 6): The proxy font file is automatically created and included into your document when you save the document: Note that the included proxy font exists in two places: on your disk and in your document. You need transmit only the document with included proxy font: there is no need to transmit the disk font.

Using Documents with Proxy Fonts

In order for Smart Characters to display characters from ideographic fonts(4- 13), they must be on your disk. Each time you open a document file that has an included proxy font(D- - 6), the font is extracted and written to the disk and directory that contains the document file.

How Proxy Fonts Are Made

When you save a document with a user font(4- 12) set to Use Proxy, Smart Characters reads through the document and makes a list of characters used in the designated user font. It then creates a new proxy font(D- - 6) in the same directory as the original document, writes the concordance(D- - 2) to the new font, and copies the font data from the user font to the proxy font. If File | Options Embed User Characters(3- 4) is activated, Smart Characters appends the entire proxy font in ascii format to the document file (fonts are stored on disk in binary format). Ascii format eases transmission via electronic network, and makes the document easier to edit or view using ordinary word processors.

From that point on, Smart Characters substitutes the identical proxy font character for each user character(4- 10) used in the document at the time the proxy font was last saved.


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Last Modified: March 23, 1996

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