Recently I found out about a little program in Windows XP I'd never heard of before. It's called the Private Character Editor (PCE) and you can use it to create your own special characters. You can then access your special characters using Windows' built-in Character Map utility. If you've ever had to insert tiny graphics into a document for bullets, logos, or special symbols, you can see how it could be useful.
For example, our Logical Expressions logo is a pair of parentheses surrounding an exclamation point, like so (!). (And yes, for those mega nerds in the room, it really is a logical expression.) Anyway, I thought it would be fun to see if I could recreate it using the PCE.
To run the PCE, choose Start|Run and then type eudcedit. When it opens, you see the Select Code dialog box, which shows you the characters you've created. You can create up to 6,400 characters, but the first time you use it, you won't see any. Click the first block and click OK to open the editing window.
You can draw your character using the pencil or line tool, however, in my case, I used existing characters. You can copy an existing character to the grid by choosing Edit|Copy Character. You can use any character from any font on your system, so I selected the font we used for our logo.
Unfortunately, it's sort of challenging to get more than one character into the editor because they overwrite each other. For the Logical Expressions logo, I actually needed three characters. However, I worked around the one-character limitation. First I chose Edit|Copy Character and put in a parenthesis. Then I chose Edit|Cut so I could put in another character and not lose my parenthesis. I then chose Edit|Copy Character to add the exclamation point. I used the rectangular selection tool to move it over a bit and then chose Edit|Paste to paste in my left parenthesis. I moved it to the left of the exclamation point. Then I pasted in another parentheses and moved it to the right of the exclamation point. Finally, I selected the right-hand parenthesis and chose Tools|Flip Rotate and horizontally flipped it to turn it into a true right parenthesis.
Once you have created your character, you can link it to one font or all your fonts. If you linked your private characters to all fonts, you can select them in Character Map by choosing All Fonts (Private Characters). Then you can just copy your character into a document.
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