Fixed character codes for diacritics in 48 fonts

[ronnodas]

These 48 fonts each had three tagged characters at the end that seemed to be incorrectly tagged, with codes -1, -2 and -3. This is bad for a few reasons:

1. They can't get picked up as the characters that they are supposed to be.
2. A "character" with a negative character code is supposed to denote human-readable information about the font, typically translation tables (as in manual versions of control files) but that's clearly not the case here.
3. -1 is supposed to just be invalid as a character code per the FIGfont standard line 1086+.

All the characters are labeled circumflex, grave and tilde (and seem to be different from the characters ^, ` and ~ from the ASCII range) so I've assumed them to be the corresponding diacritic symbols. The fonts seem to occur in a set of 26 and another set of 22; in each set the map -1, -2, -3 -> circumflex, grave, tilde was the same.

[peterbrittain]

Looks like these were generated with https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.funet.fi/pub/unix/tools/figlet/fonts/contributed/bdffonts/bdf2flf.pl

My reading of that code is that it would create negative numbers for characters with no recognised encoding. Don't know why these 3 were problematic, but I'm guessing that's a function of the original bdf files.

Net is that this looks like a reasonable fix for those bad chars.

[peterbrittain]

That said, I think you've used the unicode for combining diacritics. Does that work, or does it just print as a separate character?

[ronnodas]

That said, I think you've used the unicode for combining diacritics. Does that work, or does it just print as a separate character?

Even with universal smushing I don't think the combining can really work, but what other characters would these be? The glyphs are different from the usual tilde etc in the ASCII block (see eg cour.flf). The other option would be to just remove these.

[peterbrittain]

Yes - that is exactly what I'm pondering... What do you think @pwaller ? Should we just delete these characters?

[pwaller]

👍 sounds fine to me for now, but if they have some use and someone wants to implement whatever logic is needed that's also possible.

[peterbrittain]

Given that they could work as given, let's just take it.