Hi, all.

When I created my very first fonts back in the end of the 90's, I was willing to mimic actual LCD displays used in calculators but the main problem was to insert commas and/or zeroes between characters and keep their distances (mono spaced font) as it happens in most actual LCD/LED displays. When testing possible solutions, I ended up defining these characters with length/size = 0, so when they were typed in, the cursor remained in the same place and they were 'drawn' at the left side of it. I used this 'trick' in some other circumstances, like defining two color in the same character by using a 'zero length/size' mask that was drawn in the back of any character when typed in right after it. I'll post my fonts here this weekend (most of them were actually updated in 2004, but I still have some scratch files dated 1998 and above) and you'll see what I am talking about.

The fact is that the PDF files generated from documents using this characters keep their look, but I tried some things with Linux applications (OpenOffice under Ubuntu 11 to 14) after installing the same TTF and the resulting effects were not the same.

Has anyone dealt with characters this way? I'd like to read more about this subject.

Thanks.
Luiz

Have you thought about kerning the font rather than setting character width to zero.

Hi, toto. Thanks for your reply.

I remember I tried so, but I cannot tell you for sure if I did it right back then, I just could not get the effect I needed. But then again, chances are I was doing something wrong. All I had was the CorelDRAW! 3.0 manual (1998) when I created the original, raw fonts and I do not remember reading about kernning there. Later, in 2004, I could use FontCreator 4 and remodeled some of them. No one with knowledge enough to discuss about that, no specific forums, internet were I live was not exactly widely spread as it is today... I was kinda `Johny Castaway of the TTF creation` around here.

I remember trying kernning but the dots and commas with zero-width (thanks for pointing the correct term...) seemed OK for me, although it is somehow hard to manage characters `that small`... The very first problem I faced was to handle them under Linux text processors, mainly LibreOffice presentations, but this is another issue...

Thanks again.
Luiz

You do not have fonts on this so no one could really see the problem. But kerning might solve your problem. The problem is that I do not know if all Linux apps you are using use kerning data.