Assigning an Encoding

Defining the encoding for a font falls into two cases:

• The font's character set matches that of another font for which the software already knows the encoding. In this case, all you need to do is assign the same encoding to the your font. This is described in the rest of this section.
• The font's character set is completely unique. In this case, you will have to create a new encoding first, and then assign it to your font. See Creating a New Encoding.

Once you have decided to assign an encoding to a font, the next step is to determine if its character set matches that of a font for which our software already has an encoding. This is easy if you designed your own font as a perfect substitute for another font that our software already knows about. For example, if you created your own version of the Symbol font, its encoding would be the same as the Symbol font's --- "Symbol". If you aren't in this lucky situation, you'll have to work a bit harder. There are a couple of ways to do this:

If you have access to the Internet, you can view the our font encoding tables and try to find an exact match in terms of characters and their positions in the font. It would help if you display the font in question in MathType's Insert Symbol dialog, as described in the previous section.

Display the font in question in Window's Character Map utility. Use MathFlow's Insert Symbol dialog to view other math fonts on your system, looking for an exact match in terms of characters and their positions in the font. If you find a match, write down the encoding name for the font.

If you found an encoding that matches your new font, you have to tell MathFlow about it by adding to the Fonts section of FontInfo.ini. See The FontInfo.ini File and Font Sections for details. If you assign an encoding to a font, you should consider letting the Design Science tech support department know so we can add it to the built-in font knowledge of the next version of our software. Just send an email to support@dessci.com and mention the font name and the encoding name (please be precise). If you can, send us a copy of the font and any other information associated with it. If it is a commercially available font, let us know who makes it.