APL Font

Default Font

The default APL font for NARS2000 (its APL Interpreter session, function editing, screen display and printing purposes) and this wiki is (in order of preference) APL386 Unicode, APL385 Unicode, SImPL medium(Unicode based), or SImPL.

If the APL characters in the articles don't display correctly, you may obtain a copy of the APL386 Unicode and SImPL medium font by downloading the current NARS2000 binary, or the APL385 Unicode font from here, or the SImPL font from here. Normally these fonts may be found in your downloaded NARS2000 program folder, e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\NARS2000 (for the 32-bit program) or C:\Program Files\NARS2000 (for the 64-bit version).

Default Keyboard Layout

NARS2000 default APL keyboard layout, based on the SImPL medium font, is found here, on SudleyPlace.com. Printing the keyboard layout and keeping it in front of you while using NARS2000 - provides a handy reference. Just as typists eventually memorize the QWERTY (oe AZERTY, etc.) keyboard layout, most APL'ers quickly memorize APL keyboard layouts. A printed keyboard reference is good to keep however, if only for some of the lesser used APL symbols. Several frequently used APL symbols are very easily keyboard-memorized: ∊ (epsilon = Alt-e), ⍴ (rho = Alt-r), ∼ (tilde = Alt-t) and ⍳ (iota = Alt-i) since the beginning letter of the symbol is same-placed as its qwerty letter equivalent in the alphabet. Also, all of the APL symbols may be found (and copied to the current session or function being edited) from the Language Bar at the top of the APL session window. Cross ref. wiki page Keyboard and Language bar.

Font Issues

Even if you have an APL font installed, that may not be the end of the story. Each font designer decides what glyphs to display and for which characters. Also, some implementations of supposedly Unicode fonts don't always display the same glyphs in the same places or in the same way. The SimPL Medium font, which comes with NARS2000, will display some characters with different glyphs than are displayed by the font APL385 Unicode. For example, these are the underlined letters A to Z, which are valid identifiers in APL: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. Now, to display these characters in APL385 Unicode, the characters use code positions 9398 through 9423, or 0x24B6 through 0x24CF, which show up as Ⓐ Ⓑ Ⓒ Ⓓ Ⓔ Ⓕ Ⓖ Ⓗ Ⓘ Ⓙ Ⓚ Ⓛ Ⓜ Ⓝ Ⓞ Ⓟ Ⓠ Ⓡ Ⓢ Ⓣ Ⓤ Ⓥ Ⓦ Ⓧ Ⓨ Ⓩ, which, while not the same, is very close. When copying underlined APL characters to the clipboard, you may convert them to lowercase by first setting the user preference "Underbar alphabet converted to lowercase".

The standard Arial font doesn't even have a built-in set of underlined characters, nor does SimPL. (Yet note some glyphs, as shown below, that are used by NARS2000, are not present in APL385.)

Also, the settings for Unicode for APL symbols, which are listed as being 0x2300 - 0x23F3, do not necessarily appear - or appear the same - in all APL fonts.

Extra APL Glyphs

While any Unicode APL font will display all of the standard APL glyphs, NARS2000 uses (or has plans to use) some extra glyphs not found in all Unicode APL fonts such as

Name	Symbol	Unicode Code Point	Keystroke	Description
Section	§	167 or U+00A7	Alt-t	Multiset Symmetric Difference
Plus-or-Minus	±	177 or U+00B1	Alt-q	Ball Arithmetic
Pi	π	960 or U+03C0	Alt-p	Prime Decomposition and Number-theoretic
Chi	χ	967 or U+03C7	Alt-C	Anonymous Functions/Operators/Hyperators
Double-Shriek	‼	8252 or U+203C	Alt-k	Combinatorial Operator
Derivative	∂	8706 or U+2202	Alt-D	Derivative
NaN	∅	8709 or U+2205	Alt-5	NaN
Root	√	8730 or U+221A	Alt-R	Square Root and Nth Root
Infinity	∞	8734 or U+221E	Alt-f	Infinity
Integral	∫	8747 or U+222B	Alt-S	Integral
Double-Tilde	≈	8776 or U+2248	Alt-Q	Ball Arithmetic
Mismatch	≢	8802 or U+2262	Alt-@	Mismatch
Left-shoe-underbar	⊆	8838 or U+2286	Alt-Z	Subset of
Right-shoe-underbar	⊇	8839 or U+2287	Alt-X	Superset of
Circle-middle-dot	⊙	8857 or U+2299	Alt-?	Null operator
Quad-jot	⌻	9019 or U+233B	Alt-F	Matrix Operator
Downtack-overbar	⍑	9041 or U+2351	Alt-B	Transform Operator
Quad-colon	⍠	9056 or U+2360	Alt-_	Variant operator
Dieresis-downtack	⍡	9057 or U+2361	Alt-N	Convolution operator
Dieresis-del	⍢	9058 or U+2362	Alt-G	Dual operator†
Dieresis-star	⍣	9059 or U+2363	Alt-P	Power operator
Dieresis-jot	⍤	9060 or U+2364	Alt-J	Rank/Atop operator
Dieresis-circle	⍥	9061 or U+2365	Alt-O	Composition operator
Down-shoe-stile	⍦	9062 or U+2366	Alt-m	Multiset operator
Dieresis-tilde	⍨	9064 or U+2368	Alt-T	Commute/Duplicate operator
Del-tilde	⍫	9067 or U+236B	Alt-K	Commutator operator†
Zilde	⍬	9068 or U+236C	Alt-}	Empty simple numeric vector
Stile-tilde	⍭	9069 or U+236D	Alt-M	Partition operator†
Line Continuation	➥	10149 or U+27A5	Shift-Enter	Line Continuation Marker

† = Not currently implemented.

All but the Integral and Line Continuation symbols may be found in SImPL medium and all but the NaN, Derivative, Null, and Line Continuation symbols in APL385 Unicode.

All of the above symbols may be found in APL386 Unicode.