2013

line, nranges tells how many contiguous ranges of numbers are used as escape
codes; b1, e1, b2, e2, and so on, define the beginning and ending codes in each
range. Therefore, the header for a Japanese Big Font file might look like this:
*BIGFONT 4000,2,090,0AF,0E0,0FF
After the *BIGFONT line, the font definition is just like a regular AutoCAD text
font, except that character codes (shape numbers) can have values up to 65535.
Define an Extended Big Font File
To reduce the size of composite Kanji characters, you can define an extended
Big Font file. Extended big fonts use the subshape code, followed immediately
by a 0.
The first line of an extended Big Font file is the same as the regular Big Font
file. This is the format for the remaining lines of the file:
*0,5,font-namecharacter-height, 0, modes, character-width,0
.
.
.
*shape-number,defbytes,shape-name
.
code,0,primitive#,basepoint-x,basepoint-y,width,height,
.
.
code,0,primitive#,basepoint-x,basepoint-y,width,height,
.
terminator
The following list describes the fields of a Big Font definition file:
character height Used along with character width to indicate the number of
units that define the font characters.
character width Used along with character height to indicate the number of
units that define the font characters. The character-height and
character-width values are used to scale the primitives of the font. In this
context, primitives are the points, lines, polygons, or character strings of the
font geometrically oriented in two-dimensional space. A Kanji character
consists of several primitives used repeatedly in different scales and
combinations.
172 | Chapter 8 Shapes and Shape Fonts