Font Character Sets

This topic contains a listing of the common decimal codes for characters found in each of the fonts used for rending transformation and extraction. You can use these lists when designating characters to be stripped out or replaced in a plug-in.

You should note that the Courier and ESPS ANSI fonts contain the standard ANSI character set. The ESPS font contains the standard ANSI character set, with the exception of codes 177 through 185; these have been replaced with superior numbers (one through nine). The ESPS Ascii font contains the standard ASCII character set. When rendering or extracting, you should use the same font set that was used to create the document since character mapping can vary between fonts. InSight Rendering uses the ESPS ANSI font for special character replacement in all plug-ins. You can choose which font to use in the ASCII plug-in.

For special language or graphical characters beyond the standard ANSI (Latin 1) code page, see your system administrator for a list of the codes specific to the ANSI code page(s) used in your organization.

In the following font character sets, those values that have an empty box displayed are not supported. A blank represents a space (the character produced by the spacebar on your keyboard). The code number precedes the actual printed character in the font character sets. You should use the code number in the Special Characters dialog box.

For example, to replace a capital "I" with a lowercase "i" using the Courier font, you should type 73 in the Special Character box and type 105 in the Replacement Character box.

To identify special printer controls, you can use the following control codes (escape sequence codes):

Control codes identify printer commands used to format the text in a document. Though you can replace or strip-out these codes in the Special Characters dialog box, be careful when stripping out or replacing these codes. The control codes behave differently in different file formats. For example, consider the carriage return and newline control codes. In source documents created with word processing programs, a carriage return ends a line and goes to the beginning of the next line. You can replace a carriage return with a space to bring two lines together into one line.

However, in an ASCII file a carriage return only returns to the beginning of the same line. It is used to overstrike a line, which results in a bolding effect on the text. Used in combination with a newline code, the carriage return makes the printer essentially end the line and start at the beginning of the next line. Stripping out or replacing these control codes from an ASCII file is not recommended because the result will not reflect the proper format of the document text.