Help: having some trouble dublicating a character

[ioscar]

to me its an asterisk. But i just cant get it to look right. im using unstructured frame 10. ive tried several character designs but nothing seems to look right. i have microsoft office installed so i have a ton of fonts. i dont care how its done just as its 90% similar when printed. Help please.

[Bob_Niland]

Look like you want a full cell asterisk. The normal one is inherently superscripted (and may only have five arms in some typefaces).

You might want to try Dingbats (Zapf, I don't know if WingDings are identical here).

Hex codes \xb5 ... \x5d, \x67 ... \x6a

Or just copy and paste from MS Character Map.

_____

Hack: If the normal one has the desired shape, subscript it and increase the point size.

[ioscar]

color me a newbie. how do i use hex codes?

[Bob_Niland · Accepted solution]

Let's suppose that Zapf Dingbats \x6b is what we want.
This is how I'd do it:

1. Create a Character Format named "Dingbats".
   Set all fields of the dialog to As-Is or blank except:
   Family: ZapfDingbats
2. Special > Variable [Create Variable]
   Name: char.symbol.asterisk-full
   Definition: <Dingbats>\x6b<Default ¶ Font>
3. Anywhere you need this:
   Special > Variable
   {select char.symbol.asterisk-full from list}
   [Insert]

You might need to play with the point size in the Chr Fmt.

Yes, you can hand type this as a local override, using some special keyboard sequence.

Doing it as a variable has numerous advantages: It avoids having the next character be a Dingbat too, if not also the wrong size. You don't need to memorize or look up the key sequence, font name, etc. every time you need it. You get global control over all instances, in case you find a glyph you like better in some other typeface. If used in a heading, it will appear as an "*" instead of a "k". Spell check won't hassle you about the "k".

[ioscar]

i have a zapf dingbats and a itc zapf dingbats. the captial s from itc... is near perfect. why two dingbats?

[Bob_Niland]

i have a zapf dingbats and a itc zapf dingbats. the captial s from itc... is near perfect.

You can use the same texhnique to create a variable for that.

By the way, when you type in hex codes that map to printable characters in the roman set, Frame may instantly re-write the hex code as the roman char.

why two dingbats?

Because art directors are dingbats?

I've had to create a separate dingbats subdir at home to manage all the dingbats fonts I have. Microsoft is up to at least four 'bats now, with Wingdings 1-3 and Webdings. Every app that comes along thinks that all its icons should be glyphs in a new font. I suspect that Unicode is already overloaded with variant asterisks.

[ioscar]

youre my hero.