Hello,

Is there a way I can use a special symbol in WebFOCUS? Specifically I'm looking for the symbol that can be found in MS Word under Symbol and then Subset 'Geometric Shapes' and then Character code 25BA from Unicode (hex). Shortcut key: 25BA, Alt+X.

I would be happy to hear any suggestions.

Thank you.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: SWES,

do a google search for the ISO Character Set

Susannah thank you for your reply. Unfortunately it did not help me any further. When I do a search I get stuck in many different ISO sets and stuff like that... how would it help me?

This is something I use to get special character codes to be used in HEXBYT -

TABLE FILE CASHFLOW
  SUM COMPUTE VALUE/I3 = IF LAST VALUE EQ 0 THEN 33 ELSE LAST VALUE + 1;
      COMPUTE CHAR1/A1 = HEXBYT(VALUE, 'A1'); AS 'TNM'
      COMPUTE CHAR2/A1 = HEXBYT(VALUE, 'A1'); AS 'Symbol'
      COMPUTE CHAR3/A1 = HEXBYT(VALUE, 'A1'); AS 'WebDings'
      COMPUTE CHAR4/A1 = HEXBYT(VALUE, 'A1'); AS 'Wingdings'
      COMPUTE CHAR5/A1 = HEXBYT(VALUE, 'A1'); AS 'Wingdings 2'
      COMPUTE CHAR6/A1 = HEXBYT(VALUE, 'A1'); AS 'Wingdings 3'
   BY CASH_DATE NOPRINT
ON TABLE SET PAGE NOLEAD
ON TABLE SET HTMLCSS ON
ON TABLE SET LINES 999999
ON TABLE SET STYLE *
  TYPE=REPORT, FONT='ARIAL', HFREEZE=ON, $
  TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=CHAR1, FONT='TIMES NEW ROMAN', $
  TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=CHAR2, FONT='SYMBOL', $
  TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=CHAR3, FONT='WEBDINGS', $
  TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=CHAR4, FONT='WINGDINGS', $
  TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=CHAR5, FONT='WINGDINGS 2', $
  TYPE=DATA, COLUMN=CHAR6, FONT='WINGDINGS 3', $
ENDSTYLE
END

Look around and you should find the character that you need.

T

but wouldn't that mean, T, that the recipient would have to have the chosen font resident on his/her desktop? one of those unicode things would be font/browser agnostic.

Whats the format of the output ?

You can add it to HTML output with ► or ►. This does depend on the font, but should work with most.

e.g.
►: ►
►: ►

The other option is to open up charmap and check out the range available for each font. The easy ones will be DOS ones, as they only use two byts to get, 0 - 255, and therefore can be coded with HEXBYT, if its a report of some sort.

quote:

the recipient would have to have the chosen font resident on his/her desktop

Yes, if delivered via an HTML/XML type output, but not PDF. However, to get the symbol to show in PDF you would have to ensure that font is available to PDF at report creation (a search of the forum for "PDF font"?).

However, because "Windows 7" was mentioned in the signature, it is likely that most of the end users would also be on a similar platform (being too logical?) and as the fonts that I use in my fex are standard Windose fonts it therefore follows that using a character code from the output of my fex should be satifactory?

T

This is all great response. Meanwhile I managed to get the desired symbol into the report via the GUI. As fate would have it: the output PDF is a necessity for the client

So the challenge left now is that as soon as I run the report as output PDF it gives an 'u' rather then the symbol which I do see in HTML.

Hopefully there is still a way to solve this? The 'PDF font for report creation' could do the trick I guess...

For PDF creation I am trying to add the font, with the guidance of the following topic:

As I found out in 7.7 you will need to modify the file fontsamp.xml. Following the explanation in the fontsamp.xml, this is what I add in the fontsamp.xml:

<fontmap version="1">
  <when format="PDF PS">
<family name="WINGDNG3">
    <font style="normal"
          metricsfile="Wingdings3"   fontfile="WINGDNG3"   fonttype="TTF" />
</family>  

In addition I put the two files needed (Wingdings3.afm and WINGDNG3.ttf) in directory specified:
ibi\srv77\wfs\etc

and just to make sure also in:

ibi\srv77\home-WFS\etc

Unfortunately, the symbol doesn't show up in the report. In the GUI the font is called 'Wingdings 3'. What do I put in my script?

TYPE=DATA,
     COLUMN=N2,
     FONT='WINGDINGS 3',  

Or:

TYPE=DATA,
     COLUMN=N2,
     FONT='WINGDNG3',  

What would you suggest I can do? I am not sure if the .afm file is correct since I generated this one via a website. Also I am not sure if TTF is the correct format, as the instructions point at this as a 'specific feature that is available for Chinese, Japanese and Korean'. So would that mean I need to use the .PFB or .PFA format? If so, where are these to be found?

We have added our own fonts before, and used the AFM and PFB files to do it. They are added to the PDF.FMP file.

There is a utility that can create the files. Have a look here

Haven't done this in 7.7 though.

I believe that its documented here in the forum.

What happened is that I had to modify the fontuser.xml rather than the fontsamp.xml. Both files look identical but only adding the font in fontuser.xml showed result.

Furthermore it's important that the font name is the same name in your stylesheet as it is in the .xml file.