Fonts

When you click on the Add button from the Fonts area of the Configuration pane, you are presented with a list of fonts that you can use to read strings. To add a font to this list, click on the Import from file... button and select a MIL SureDotOCR font file. This is essentially a text file, with the extension MDMRF, containing content that respects the expected specifications for defining a SureDotOCR font.

Modifications made to SureDotOCR fonts and characters are saved with your Matrox Design Assistant project. You can export these fonts from your project, and import them into another project; you can also import fonts that were exported from a MIL SureDotOCR context. Such fonts automatically have the proper extension and follow the expected specifications. To export a font, you must first click the Edit... button from the Fonts area of the Configuration pane.

Content of SureDotOCR font files

Optionally, you can manually create and update your own font files by using the MDMRF extension when saving (instead of, for example, the TXT extension). Ensure the file is in UTF-16 (little-endian order) and starts with a byte order mark (BOM) that indicates this; the BOM value is U+FEFF. Although often supported, editors might not use the standard terminology, UTF-16. For example, you might have to save the file as Unicode or UCS-2 little-endian.

The content of all SureDotOCR font files must adhere to expected specifications. Below is an example of how SureDotOCR expects the character 'A' to appear in a font:

The following is a line-by-line description of what SureDotOCR files should contain.

Line	Description
1	This line contains the text, "File Representation".
2	This line contains the text, "MIL_DOT_FONT".
3	This line is blank.
4 and above	These lines specify the entry of every character in the font. Each entry begins with the word "CharValue", a space, and the character name. The character's dot-matrix representation is on the next line. "FF" is for dots that represent the character; the rest use "00". Every dot-matrix of every character must contain at least one "FF", and have the same number of columns and rows. Lines beginning with the hash character ('#') are comments. They should not be within a character's dot-matrix and are typically used sparingly (only when they provide true value). Blank lines separate multiple characters in a font. A character's "CharValue" name should properly identify its dot-matrix representation. For example, if the "CharValue" name is '1', its dot-matrix should not represent the letter 'A'. "CharValue" names should be unique within a font. Character names can be in UTF-16 byte hexadecimal; these begin with "\x". For example, "CharValue \x0041" specifies 'A'. Alternatively, you can enter the UTF-16 character directly (for example, the capital Greek letter PSI) if using Windows API functions with the UTF-16 macro, and your source code is saved as Unicode. Expressing characters in UTF-16 byte hexadecimal allows you to specify them directly in C++ string literals. This notation can also be useful if you are in an ASCII environment and you want to have Unicode characters beyond the Basic Latin range. Names for special surrogate pairs in UTF-16 byte hexadecimal are listed successively. For example, "CharValue \xD83D\xDE0A" specifies a smiley face character. Dot-matrix fonts cannot represent certain characters, such as null or the standard space (0x0020). To establish the distance between characters in a string that represents a space, refer to the Define spaces subsection of the Procedure for using the SureDotOCR step section earlier in this chapter.