“At” in font typename

Several Windows font names start with “@” in their names, but what does that mean exactly? I think this is not of interest for me only – I just had a related support question from a customer. After googling 20 minutes I finally found the answer on MSDN (article “Vertical Writing and Printing“, which is no longer available, though):

As the following illustration shows, displaying text vertically doesn’t mean that you simply rotate an entire line of text by 90 degrees. Most characters remain upright, but others, such as those identified by arrows, change orientation.

Fortunately, with Win32 you don’t need to write code to rotate characters. To display text vertically on Windows, enumerate the available fonts as usual and select a font whose typeface name begins with the at (@) character. Then create a LOGFONT structure, setting both the escapement and the orientation to 270 degrees. Calls to TextOut are the same as for horizontal text.

The Far East Win32 SDK contains a sample application called TATE (short for tategaki, meaning “vertical writing”) which demonstrates how to create fonts and display vertical text. Figure 7-22 shows a sample file displayed in TATE using a horizontal font. Selecting a vertical font from the Font dialog box (see Figure 7-23 below) causes the text to be displayed vertically. (See Figure 7-24 below.)

As a result all LMD controls like TLMDFontComboBox, which allow to display or select a font, support now an option to hide such font names when they are of no or little use for your end customers.