This is an outdated 8-bit font. It is not a Unicode font and is unsuitable for use on Internet web pages. It may be useful for internal documents or those to be exchanged with others who own the same font.

Macromedia has provided sample source code as a template font for developing cross-platform fonts. This page gives developers some tests for Cross and Cross Symbol TrueType font presentation in a browser when the underlying HTML source code type differs. Comparisons of four web page character coding methods are presented in four-color charts. This page has a character set encoding of "charset=windows-1252". Pages with these same charts, but different declared character set encodings, may be seen at "ISO-8859-1", "UTF-8" and on a page with no character set encoding. A verification image provides confidence that the font appears as it should.

The Numismatica font project requires development of a interim 8-bit font with identical performance on all platforms and the ability to display properly on web pages, plus have backward compatibility with earlier systems. Macromedia's Cross font is a tutorial font designed for Macintosh and Windows cross-platform use. It includes only the character positions recognized by most Macintosh and Windows operating systems and thus provides a template for fonts fully portable between those operating systems.

Cross font is suited to large-point text, but its use on this page provides an easily available font for Fontographer developers to validate cross-platform behavior of the four different HTML text entry techniques and their appearance in web browsers. Four-color comparison charts of these coding methods are presented below using (1) ANSI font decimal codes, (2) ANSI font characters, (3) HTML 4.0 entity codes, and (4) Unicode hexadecimal codes, as defined here.

Two versions of the font are used on this page, Cross and Cross Symbol. To create the font, you must use Macromedia Fontographer software to generate it from the source code which is available as a learning tool from Macromedia. The Cross font characters are copyrighted by the Treacyfaces font foundry and licensing restrictions prohibit my distribution of the font; you'll have to generate your own.

All usable cross-platform characters except delete are included in the charts below, which include the 17 characters that you must remove if supporting Mac Word.

Characters in Cross Font
Comparing Source Codes

This chart compares the four types of source code for characters in the Cross font. See the verification image to confirm correct presentation in your browser. Without the Cross font installed, you'll see this chart in your browser's default font.

Characters in Cross Symbol Font
Comparing Source Codes

This chart compares the four types of source code for characters in the Cross Symbol font, insuring the Unicode Private area codes in the font are properly remapped. See the verification image to confirm correct presentation in your browser. Without the Cross Symbol font installed, you'll see this chart in your browser's default font.

Font Creation

Production of both Macintosh and Windows versions of the TrueType fonts was accomplished on a Windows XP computer using Fontographer for Windows, version 4.1.5, with the final PC-to-Mac conversion done on a Macintosh OS9. Only one FOG file was used to create all the fonts as follows:

• Open the original Macromedia Cross font file in Fontographer. Export the encoding as a file. Copy the contents of the encoding file into the FONTOG.ENC file in the FOG41 directory, using the instructions at the top of that file. Ensure there is at least one carriage return at the end of the file. You must close and then restart Fontographer for the new encoding to be available.
• The Windows Cross font was produced by selecting the Cross encoding as the viewed encoding. Ensure the internal font family name is "Cross". Then, using the "Generate Font Files" menu, set options to PC computer, TrueType format, Bitmap format to none, set encoding to Cross, PC family to Roman, and turn off "Use Symbol encoding" in the TrueType options.
• The Windows Cross Symbol font was produced by selecting the Cross encoding as the viewed encoding. Ensure the internal font family name is "Cross Symbol". Then, using the "Generate Font Files" menu, set options to PC computer, TrueType format, Bitmap format to none, custom encoding, PC family to Decorative, and turn on "Use Symbol encoding" in the TrueType options. Because it is generated as a symbol font, the characters in Cross Symbol are remapped into a portion of the Unicode Private area, F000-F0FF hexadecimal.
• The Macintosh Cross font was produced by first selecting the Cross encoding as the viewed encoding, then changing the viewed encoding to Macintosh, with the internal font family name "Cross". Then, using the "Generate Font Files" menu, set options to Macintosh computer, TrueType format, Bitmap format to none, Macintosh encoding, and turn off "Use Symbol encoding" in the TrueType options.
• I was not able to successfully create a version of Macintosh Cross Symbol font on a PC because the remapping of characters to the Unicode range confuses positions in the 129 to 255 decimal range when the font is converted for use on a Mac.

A Cross font test document in RTF and Microsoft Word for Windows 2002 formats is available for download here. It provides an explanation of the character mapping and codes used. It also contains information about using custom fonts in Microsoft Word, and the process for converting fonts created in Fontographer for Windows into Macintosh fonts.

Cross-Platform Compatibility

Experiments on Windows XP and Macintosh OS9 computers has shown there are 212 usable character slots for cross-platform use, not counting the space, delete, non-breaking space and soft hyphen characters required by the operating systems and thus unusable for use as other glyphs.

MS Word 2001 for Macintosh on OS9 does not support 20 ANSI characters, those not included in the MacRoman character set while Netscape 7.0 browser does support them. These characters (and their ANSI decimal codes) are the Scaron (138), scaron (154), currency (164), brokenbar (166), twosuperior (178), threesuperior (179), onesuperior (185), onequarter (188), onehalf (189), threequarters (190), Eth (208), multiply (215), Yacute (221), Thorn (222), eth (240), yacute (253) and thorn (254). The Zcaron and zcaron were not designed into Cross font, and Windows soft hyphen is handled by mapping the MacRoman minus sign to the ANSI soft hyphen character code (173). Thus we lose 17 character positions if Mac Word 2001 is to be supported, reducing the usable cross-platform characters to 195.

Note: The euro sign postdates development of the Cross font, but still can not be considered for cross-platform use because Macintosh and Windows do not use equivalent positions for implementing it: Macintosh replaced the currency sign with the Euro, while Windows placed Euro on an unused code position and retained the currency sign. Macintosh applications may or may not substitute euro for the currency symbol, and therefore cross-platform fonts should not use the currency character position (decimal 119 on the Mac, ANSI 164 on Windows). The Mac version of Cross font was fixed, but you must correct the Windows version FOG file to make character position 164 "not defined" (.notdef).

The euro character is encoded in the Unicode Standard as U+20AC EURO SIGN, MacRoman Encoding decimal 219, hex 0xDB. For Apple Symbol font, the glyph has been added at Option-t (MacRoman Encoding decimal 160, hex 0xA0, previously unused).

Also note that Cross font uses several Unicode equivalents from locations other than the Latin-1 Supplement block:

Note that portable fonts do NOT work with basic text editors. They are designed for desktop publishing applications or word processing formatted files because they read the font's encoding, whereas a basic text editor does not.

The standard Macintosh TrueType fonts (Times, Helvetica, Courier) are actually quite different from the standard Windows fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New). Although these fonts come from the same font families, the actual font metrics are different. So even a short document can paginate differently when you move it to the other platform, and a long document can display a considerable difference in pages.

However, Word for Mac also contains the same Microsoft TrueType font set that's found in Word for Windows. So to minimize font-mapping difficulties, stick with Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, and Wingdings when you need to share Word documents between Macs and PCs.

Use of some ANSI characters in HTML

The ANSI character set contains all the ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) characters, plus the following  additional 27 visible characters in the range 128 to 159 decimal:

Of these 27 characters, only 24 are included in the Cross font. Numeric references in HTML to their ANSI code positions may create problems for those who don't use a Windows browser. For example, a web page which uses ™ to represent a trademark symbol will be seen on a Unix browser or possibly other non-Windows systems as a blank instead of the proper symbol, or something worse. A document by Jukka Korpela explains this problem in detail.

If you want Cross font to have absolute cross-platform compatibility in HTML browsers (where the web page author can't make a mistake), you would eliminate an additional 24 characters from the font, leaving only 171 useable characters. However, full compatibility is achieved if web page authors avoid using a numeric representation of the ANSI characters in the range 128 to 159 decimal (for example, ™). Instead, they must use the HTML 4.0 entity codes (™) or Unicode values (™ or −) in their HTML source code. Note that ANSI characters from 128 to 159 decimal conflict with equivalent Unicode assignments; Unicode characters in this range are non-visible control characters.

This page last updated 13 Mar 2021