Adding the Trademark symbol to a document

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
May 9, 2010
5 replies
32045 views

I want to add the trademark symbol (TM) in my document. I added it to the Reference page in the Character Macros table (like they said in the Adobe help file). But, what next? How do I insert it in the document? I don't see it listed in the Character Designer list.

Judy

Formatting and numbering

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Participant

Participating Frequently

Seriously? I hope you don't do it that way! A super-scripted two characters "TM" is not the same as the Trademark character that is what a good document should contain.

Z

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

Poking around a bit more on it, there's some peculiar stuff going on with ™, and probably with €‚ƒ„†‡ˆ‰Š‹ŒŽ‘’“”•–—˜š›œŸ as well. These are what might be called the C1 Controls orphans. They are present in Microsoft Code Page 1252 fonts, in the 80h to 9Fh range, but were dropped for ISO 8859-1, as they occupy space reserved for control codes. Unicode adopted 8859-1, and not cp1252, so also kicking these orphans out of that space, known as the C1 Controls.

TM is code point Alt+153 (99h) in cp1252.
Code point U+0099 in Unicode is now an unspecified control character, rendered (if at all) as "XXX" in a dashed box.

If we look at a legacy cp1252 font, such as Type 1 Courier, in the Windows Character Map ap, we see TM at code point 153d, aka 99h.

If we look at Type 1 Courier in the FM9 or later Character Palette, code point range 0080h-009F is surprisingly shown as vacant, and TM is surprisingly found at 2122h (which is, of course, impossible, because T1 Courier is an 8-bit font that has has no code points defined above 00FFh). The other C1 orphans are similarly moved to their coordinates in Unicode space (all above FFh).

Is FM synthesizing a Unicode version of Courier, with the C1 Control orphans moved to new code points?
Hard to say.

No matter how I enter a TM in FM9 (keyboard shortcut, \TM, ALT+153, \u2122), FM changes the representation to ™. I haven't so far been able to figure out exactly what FM is rendering to PDF for legacy and Unicode TMs. Even if I could find a generic decode-random-text app, Distiller, Acrobat Reader, and the OS clipboard could all be messing with the text code points before pasting it into the app.

This sort of magic goes on everywhere, it seems. Pasting raw TMs (or other special characters) into this forum's dialog routinely results in them being converted to HTML Entity markup, ™ in the case of TM. So, dear readers, be thankful that you only have to write text that includes special characters, and you don't have to write code that processes them from random source encodings to arbitrary receiving/rendering aps and displays.

> Is FM synthesizing a Unicode version of Courier, with the C1 Control orphans moved to new code points?

To answer my own question, it sure seems like it. For T1 Courier, FM's Character Palette (CP) shows a considerable number of glyphs above U+00FF. Due to annoying behavior by both FM CP and the Windows Character Map, there's no quick way to build a comprehensive list.

But it's clear that only some of the glyphs above FFh are relocated C1 Control orphans. Many appear to be composed Unicode characters made up of glyphs from various legacy Courier characters.

For example, code point
U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ
is shown. T1 Courier has no ligature IJ, so this had to be done by compositing I and J.
Another is
U+01E6 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G WITH CARON

This one is more of a puzzle, because T1 Courier has no stand-alone caron. Perhaps an inverted circumflex, or a lower case v, is being used as a hack.

If an application has nominal Unicode support, performing arbitrary compositing is relatively straight-forward. Unicode does not provide every possible "accented" characters for all scripts. It relies on Combining Diacritics (what in older localization schemes were non-advancing diacriticals, but are more like retreating diacriticals in Unicode). Any app pretending to support Unicode has to know how to merge (scale, place and align) multiple glyph fragments into what appears as a single character.