System and method for generating glyphs for unknown characters

Claim 1

A method for generating glyphs from a text element comprising a plurality of code points, each code point representing one said glyph, the method being executed by a program stored in a computer having a processor controlling a memory, with at least one look-up table stored in the memory ad associating a predefined set of said code points with a predefined set of said glyphs, the method including the steps of: (1) determining whether the text element has a associated glyph in the table, ad if so, proceeding to step 4, and otherwise proceeding to step 2; (2) modifying the text element by removing a first predefined subset of the text element; (3) determining whether the modified text element has a associated glyph in the table, and if so, proceeding to step 4; and (4) outputting the associated glyph.

Claim 7

A method for generating glyphs from a stream of character codes input into a computer system having a processor coupled to a memory storing software for carrying out the method and an output device coupled to the processor, the method including the steps of: (1) generating a first regular expression comprising a initial set of character codes from the input stream, the regular expression corresponding to a predefined syntax; (2) determining whether the first regular expression is found in the look-up table, and if so, retrieving a glyph corresponding to the first regular expression and proceeding to step 8; (3) if the first regular expression is not found in the look-up table, generating a first subset of the initial set of character codes as a current subset, and a first remainder of the initial set of character codes as a current remainder, the first remainder of input character codes including at least one code not included in the first subset; (4) determining whether the current subset of character codes is found in the look-up table, and if so, retrieving a glyph corresponding to the current subset and proceeding to step 7, and otherwise proceeding to step 5; (5) generating a new subset of the input character codes as the current subset and a new remainder of the input character codes as the current remainder, the current remainder including at least one code not included in the current subset; (6) determining whether a predetermined criterion is met, and if not, returning to step 4, and if so, proceeding to step 7; (7) if none of the generated subsets was located in the look-up table, designating at least one default character as a retrieved glyph and proceeding to step 8; (8) outputting the retrieved glyph to the output device.

Claim 8

A system for generating output glyphs corresponding to an input text element comprising a plurality of code points representing characters for display, including a computer having a memory storing at least one glyph table, the system including: a look-up handler for searching the table to locate a correct glyph for the text element; a fallback handler for processing the text element if a correct glyph for the text element is not located by the look-up handler, including: first generating means for generating at least one subset of the code points constituting the text element; locating means for searching the table to locate a correct glyph for the subset; and second generating means for generating a default glyph for the subset if the correct glyph for the subset is not located by the locating means; the program further including input means for receiving said correct and default glyphs from said fallback handler and output means for outputting each said correct glyph and default glyph for display.