enky’s essays

Squeak font encodings

The programming ≈language Squeak nowadays (version ≥ 4) normally uses the Bitstream Vera fonts (although the old bitmap fonts are also installed), which are Unicode-aware and work as they should. However, before version 4, the default user interface fonts were bitmaps, specifically recreations of Apple’s legacy Mac OS fonts, a font called Atlanta of unknown to me origin, and Comic Sans MS, which doesn’t work on my Linux installation and gets replaced by bold Vera Sans.

Edit 2026-03-14: On Windows, Comic Sans MS does not work either. God knows why.

Accu font pack encoding

Accuat (clone of Athens), Accujen (Geneva), Accula (Los Angeles), Accumon (Monaco), Accuny (New York), Accusf (San Francisco), Accushi (Chicago) and Accuve (Venice) all share the same glyph-codepoint mapping. The top 128 codepoints are identical to ASCII, with the exception of 0x5E being the up arrow instead of the ASCII circumflex ^.

The codepoints 0x80 through 0x9F are probably unchanged control codes, which, alas, I cannot view in a reliable way. However, 0x8F does have a printable glyph, which is a left arrow . In old versions of Smalltalk, the underscore (0x5F) was drawn with the arrow, however, by Squeak version 3, the glyph occupied by that position was already an underscore, so the left arrow glyph was moved 3 rows downward.

The remaining 96 codepoints are similar to ISO/IEC 8859-1, with a few changes (marked in bold), possibly to accommodate Apple’s Roman encoding:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
Ax ¡ ¢ £ ¥ § ¨ © ª « ¬ ® ¯
Bx ° ± ´ µ · ¸ ¹ º » ² ¿
Cx À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
Dx ı Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö ˘ Ø Ù Ú Û Ü ˙ ˚ ß
Ex à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
Fx ˝ ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ˛ ˇ ÿ

¹ The fraction slash usually has negative side bearings. As such, only a few pixels are displayed in the fonts provided by this pack.

² The glyph at 0xBE is a thin rectangle filled with pixel noise. It is unclear why it is included there.

Accula does not have most of the glyphs in the encoding’s bottom half. I suspect it is because Apple did not update Los Angeles for a long time.

Accusf does not include any glyphs in the bottom half (except NBSP at 0xA0). Given San Francisco’s design, that is not surprising.

Atlanta

The encoding of Atlanta is just Macintosh Roman with two differences:

Bitstream Vera

Unlike all other preinstalled fonts, the Bitstream Vera collection is a vector font supporting Unicode. As such, the glyphs for the entire 0x800xFF range are taken from Unicode’s “Latin-1 Supplement”, which, in turn, is equivalent to ISO/IEC 8859-1’s bottom half.

#encoding #font #programming #squeak #unicode