Meta Character Sets
Meta character sets are used for translating installable character sets and defining translation tables. In earlier versions of Uniface, meta character sets were used as internal character sets instead of Unicode.
Meta character sets are defined in a table with 128 rows, and each row is referred to as a font, identified as Font 0 to Font 127. (In this context, Font is used to identify a meta character set, not a display font such as Helvetica or Times.)
- Fonts 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 are fixed for all Uniface installable character sets.
- Fonts 5 and 6 are used for mapping single-byte installable character sets that are not
English, such as Central European, or Arabic.
Note: Some characters in Font 5 are fixed because Uniface uses them to map special characters such as the euro sign, en dash, and em dash.
- Fonts 8 to 127 are used for mapping double-byte character sets, such as Kanji and Simplified Chinese.
Each meta character set has 95 different characters, decimal values 32 through 126. Uniface
reserves the first 32 characters (0-31 decimal) plus the last character (127 decimal) for its own
use. Some of these characters are used to represent the subfield separator and profile characters.
In translation tables, a character in a meta character set is represented by a row number and a
column number, such as 33.^63 in a keyboard translation table.
The fonts used to display and print a meta character set are defined in the [printer] sections of usys.ini.
Font 0 is the system font. Changing the display or print font used for Font 0 (for example, to use a Unicode-enabled font), can result in form layouts that are too small. For information on correcting this issue, see History.
