Vanishing Unicode

[Tereza Snyder]

On Oct 29, 2013, at 12:57 PM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/29/2013 07:40 PM, Tereza Snyder wrote:
>> Having taken a long mental vacation from coding,
> 
> That sounds very, very healthy indeed.
> 
>>  I find that I’ve forgotten almost everything I knew, but this has got to be more than just a mental lapse:
>> 
>> I made a stack that uses a unicode icon font. It worked well. I made a standalone, included the font, and used revfontload to load it. It worked well. I emailed it to my client. It worked well. I reopened that stack today and all I see are little "mystery char" glyphs everywhere, and nothing I do, including updating from LC 5.5.4 to 6.1.2 changes it.
>> 
>> Can anyone help me before I lose my mind altogether?
>> 
>> t
>> 
> Probably the revFontLoad is the problem; I have never liked it, and ask my end-users to put my
> home-grown font into their font folder.
> 
> If you are using your standalone on any versions of Windows post XP there are a serious number of
> problems (err, sorry, the buzz word is "issues") relating to Unicode fonts there.
> 
> If you want you can send me the font and the stack off-list and I will:
> 
> 1. Open your font and see if your icons are stored in the Personal Private Use Area of the First Unicode Plane
> or not; certainly if they are things should be OK, but if they are in standard language specific areas Windows  will probably play merry hell with them.
> 
> Richmond.


Thanks, Richmond, but I’m not opening it in Windows at all. 

The RevFontLoad would not have been invoked today when I opened it in the development environment, as I the font is present and active in my system and the openstack handler checks the fontnames before loading the font (I confirmed that, AND I allowed RevFontLoad to load the font anyway, but it made no difference.)  I retried the various ways I used last week to add the font icons to the fields (drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, unicode input with the Unicode Hex Input keyboard), but no joy.

I just discovered something new which points a finger at my system: when I open last week’s standalone now, the icon characters are missing there too! Yet if I open that same standalone on my laptop, they appear! Hmmm.… 

Dang! I hate this kind of thing. Something wrong with the effing system. Again. Lose another day’s work.

Thanks anyway,

t

--
Tereza Snyder
Califex Software, Inc.