3-25-07 Tips ; Private Character Editor

Things You Probably Don't Know You Have Like "Private Character Editor"
Windows XP Home, Media, and Professional - Windows Vista All Versions

All versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista come with something called a Private Character Editor. Think of it as a poor person's font editor. You can, indeed, create your own fonts, but that would take you a decade or so, I think. Better to create your own characters or special hand-drawn font-like thingies.

Using Private Character Editor (PCE), you can create up to 6,400 unique characters (such as special letters and logos) for use in your font library. PCE contains basic tools for creating and editing characters, along with more advanced options.

To open Private Character Editor, click Start, click Run, and then type eudcedit . You will see a number of options. One of which is grid with drawing tools (pencil, eraser, square, circle, etc. on the left). You can draw your own character You can choose to link your private characters to all the fonts in your font library (so that any font you've selected can display your private characters - recommended) or you can choose to link your private characters only to specific fonts (so that only the specified font can display your private characters).

To use the characters you have created bring up Character Map (click start/run type in charmap). You can see them and use your characters by clicking on them to select them, then click "copy" (in the character map display) and paste them in your documents, emails, etc. It's easier for you to use your own characters if you link them to all your fonts instead of just one because then your private characters will display in the Character Map no matter which font you select.

Using the Select Code dialog box, you can view your entire set of private characters. The Select Code dialog box displays miniature views of all your private characters with their corresponding hexadecimal values.

If you want to create a new private character using an existing character as your model, you can copy the existing character to the Edit grid and then modify it to suit your needs, or you can display the existing character in a Reference window alongside your Edit grid for use as a visual reference. You can use any character from any font that is installed on your computer.

By default, PCE creates characters using the Unicode character set. In addition, if you have installed one of the Asian input languages (such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean), you can also use PCE with the Windows character set.

This might not be the handiest tip, but at least you know the Private Character Editor exists and what it does. Someone probably spent a lot of time convincing someone to include this with Windows. Now you know it's there!