Design Fonts And Characters As Your Own Choice in Windows XP

There is a small program in the recesses of Windows System32. I’m saying about ‘Private Character Editor’ (PCE). It is almost a monochrome replica of the well known utility MS Paint but it comes with an different peripheral. If you want to create your own font or add any customized symbol in the font family then this utility sounds a great.
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You can make your own character and symbol through PCE and insert in the document or use the character in any type of text editor using the ‘Character Map’. Character Map is another funny Windows utility. You can create and edit your own characters by the basic drawing tool provided by PCE along with some advanced options.
Tip: Extract Text from any Image performing OCR with Google Docs.

How to create the font yourself

1. The Private Character Editor resides in the system32 folder under Windows in the root drive. To start the utility press Windows key & R from your keyboard, type  C:WINDOWSsystem32eudcedit.exe and hit enter.
2. A ‘Select Code’ window will appear which plays the roll to associate the character you are about to create in the character library. It assigns the hexadecimal code to particulate the position of the created character. The little gray boxes represent those particular positions. Select any one of them and click on OK.
3. Now you will enter into the grid drawing interface with the drawing toolbar on the left. You can also get the drawing tools from the ‘Tools’ Menu.
4. The total grid area is 50×50 px and the character that you draw is actually a black & white bitmap image (*.bmp).
5. The drawing process is not too easy for the general users, it needs some calligraphist’s skill. Using mouse as brush you can draw the font or symbol. The left mouse button is used to draw the black and right one for white.The best thing in this utility is the ability to copy and paste between the PCE and other bitmap programs.
6. You can modify an existing character by the option ‘copy character’.
7. After finishing the drawing work you can associate your created font either with a particular font family or with all fonts installed in the computer.In the first case the new font will be available exclusively from there.
8. Now save the font into the position, you chosen in the ‘Select Code Window’ using ‘save character’ or ‘save character as’.

How to use the new  characters

To use the new character Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Character Map.The new character may be found under the specific font family or under the ‘All Fonts (Private Characters), depending on where you saved the new character. Now select the character using the ‘select’ button and the copy it by ‘copy’ button.Now you can paste it in any application.
I think this is a vary easy and productive utility in windows to enrich your document with more attractive and meaningful symbol or character. What about you? Let me know.