Stump answers
In a previous post, I mentioned two questions asked at Stump the Experts at WWDC 2003 that I knew the answers to as they were asked. The questions were:
- What Carbon API ignores all of its parameters?
- How do you generate the Dr. Seuss illustration hidden in OS X?
Spoilers follow!
The answers to those two Stump questions are:
- SysBeep(). Back in the days of the Mac Plus, the parameter used to mean something--namely the duration of the system beep. From the Mac SE (or so) on, it started playing the designated system beep sound, and the parameter was totally ignored.
- Mac OS X has a Unicode font engine called ATS, and when you type a character that doesn't have an assigned glyph in the font you're using, ATS will go hunting through your fonts to find a font that does have a glyph assigned for that character. In the case where it cannot find any font with that glyph, it substitutes a glyph from the Last Resort Font. If you look at the table, you see that the glyph in the Last Resort Font for the Private Use Area (U+E000 through U+F8FF) is the character "wum" from Dr. Seuss's On Beyond Zebra. To easily generate it (the given answer at WWDC was tedious but correct), pull up TextEdit, enable and switch to the Unicode Hex Input input method, press and hold the Option key, type "EFFF" and release the Option key.
As a bizarre aside, a project called the ConScript Unicode Registry was established to assign Unicode code points in the Private Use Area to scripts that would never get an official assignment. And, fittingly enough, there is a block reserved for Seussian Latin Extensions. So, it would probably be more appropriate to use U+E631 ("SEUSS LETTER WUM") for the example above.
Comments
Well done, Avi!
Congratulations on knowing the answer to my Stump question about the Seuss character. (And, in fact, I hadn't even thought of typing it with the Unicode Hex Input method. In any case, it was more fun and dramatic to give the longer set of steps.) As I'd hoped, a whole swath of Apple Experts didn't seem to be familiar with the Last Resort font...
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, when I try to generate the "Private Use" glyph by actually typing the code for "WUM" (E631), TextEdit just displays a blank. Too bad! It was a nice idea.
BTW, I knew that "SysBeep()" was the answer to the other question too...
best,
--blake
Posted by: Blake Hodgetts | July 29, 2003 6:13 PM