shapenumber

A number, unique to the file, between 1 and 258 (and up to 32768 for Unicode fonts), and preceded by an asterisk (*). Non-Unicode font files use the shape numbers 256, 257, and 258 for the symbolic identifiers Degree_Sign, Plus_Or_Minus_Sign, and Diameter_Symbol. For Unicode fonts these glyphs appear at the U+00B0, U+00B1 and U+2205 shape numbers and are part of the "Latin Extended-A" subset.

Text fonts (files containing shape definitions for each character) require specific numbers corresponding to the value of each character in the ASCII code; other shapes can be assigned any numbers.

defbytes

The number of data bytes (specbytes) required to describe the shape, including the terminating 0. The limit is 2,000 bytes per shape.

shapename

The shape name. Shape names must be uppercase to be recognized. Names with lowercase characters are ignored and are usually used to label font shape definitions.

specbyte

A shape specification byte. Each specification byte is a code that defines either a vector length and direction or one of a number of special codes. A specification byte can be expressed in the shape definition file as either a decimal or hexadecimal value. This section uses both decimal and hexadecimal specification byte values for its examples (as do many of the shape definition files). If the first character of a specification byte is a 0 (zero), the two characters that follow are interpreted as hexadecimal values.