John Hudson wrote as follows. >Here's an exercise for your enthusiasm, William: devise the form of the >perfect .notdef glyph. It needs to unambiguously indicate that a glyph is >missing, i.e. it should be something that can easily be mistaken for a >dingbat, and it needs to be easy to spot in proofreading in both print and >onscreen (some applications, e.g. Adobe InDesign, make the latter a bit >easier by applying colour highlight to the .notdef glyph).
Thank you for the design brief. Here is my design. The design consists of a single contour in as large a square box as is possible for the particular font. In my prototype I used a box 2048 font units by 2048 font units. In this case, the value of n is 1024. The contour has seven points, the first point and the last point being at the same place. Point 1 is at (0,0) and is on the curve. Point 2 is at (0,2n) and is off the curve. Point 3 is at (2n,2n) and is on the curve. Point 4 is at (2n,n) and is on the curve. Point 5 is at (n,n) and is on the curve. Point 6 is at (n,0) and is on the curve. Point 7 is at (0,0) and is on the curve. This has the effect of making the glyph easy to draw, solid enough to be specifically noticeable, distinctively shaped with both a curved line and straight lines so that it stands out and in an arc which goes against the normal arc of design of a graphical user interface of the input screen of a computer program so as also hopefully to make it more noticeable. In addition, the design has white space set out in a manner such that where several copies of the glyph appear in sequence on a page of text, they are easily counted. I hope that you like the design. William Overington 6 November 2002
