Technical Note PT585

ResEdit Q&As

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This Technical Note contains a collection of archived Q&As relating to a specific topic--questions sent the Developer Support Center (DSC) along with answers from the DSC engineers. Current Q&A's can be found on the Macintosh Technical Q&A's web site. [Oct 01 1990]

ResEdit can display Kanji and English at the same time

Date Written: 11/21/90

Last reviewed: 2/20/91

How do I get ResEdit to display English and Kanji at the same time, to make a Japanese version of our software? Can ResEdit even display Kanji?

The simple answer is yes, ResEdit can display Kanji and English at the same time. The first thing you'll need to do is install KanjiTalk on your system.

All you need to do (after ensuring that you have the latest releases of both KanjiTalk system software and ResEdit; check your latest Developer CD, the Developer Services folder on AppleLink, or APDA) is open up your old and your new resources at the same time and voila! you'll be able to translate and see both at the same time because KanjiTalk will use the Japanese font but will display ASCII characters in Roman fonts as you would expect.

(FYI: This is how Apple translates system software.)

Creating fixed fractional width fonts with ResEdit

Date Written: 5/6/91

Last reviewed: 6/14/93

How do we create a "fixed fractional width" font using ResEdit 2.1? I tried setting FontInfo fields such as ascent and widMax with fractional numbers, but ResEdit refused all noninteger numbers.

ResEdit doesn't know how to take fixed-point numbers as input, so it assumes the number you enter for a value like widMax is the integer representation of the fixed-point number. In other words, ResEdit displays a 16-bit fixed-point number as an integer with 256 times the value of the fixed-point number actually used by the Font Manager.

To enter the numbers with ResEdit, you'll need to do the conversion yourself. Take an 8.8 fixed-point number and multiply by 256 to get the integer to enter, or take a 4.12 fixed-point number and multiply by 4096 to get the integer.

This rigamarole is necessary because ResEdit wasn't designed to build fonts from scratch. You may find that third-party tools specifically designed for this task are easier for you. The time you save in building your width table may be worth the cost of the program.

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