Re: Fonts and open office
Re: Fonts and open office
- Subject: Re: Fonts and open office
- From: rcohen <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 12:03:41 -0700
I appreciate the POWER of a palette that gives you full access to
UNICODE. But
in terms of ease of use -- suppose you weren't allowed to use a
keyboard for
entering text in a word processor, but had to do it all by selecting
each letter from
a palette and then hitting an "insert" button -- you would probably
give up on
word processing! For those of us that do lots of typing of technical
documents,
it is the same thing. For simple in-text equations (as opposed to
complex displayed
math) a palette-based approach can't rival for speed a greek font where
you type "a" and get
"alpha", etc. So from this perspective it is a step backwards.
But anyway, OSX seems to have a symbol font supplied, in
/System/Library/Fonts. Other
fonts in that directory behave like normal fonts. What makes Symbol
different?
And there is that starting issue; I can't get a decent symbol font in
Open Office as a result.
Maybe I need to learn how to configure a custom keyboard. (Where do I
find
instructions?) That would help with TextEdit
(where I hardly ever use Symbol), but I can't see how it would help the
Open Office issue.
-Ron-
On Saturday, September 13, 2003, at 10:39 AM, Jim Elliott wrote:
What you're seeing is the difference between Carbon, the
backwards-compatibility framework to simplify porting old MacOS
applications (used by many existing apps like Office and Canvas), and
Cocoa, the modern, Objective C environment that started life as
NeXTstep (used by applications written for OS X only). Cocoa gives you
a tremendous amount of power very easily, and apps written in it take
advantage of more of the OS X environment and fit in better, but they
behave fundamentally differently than Carbon apps, and it is confusing
to have to deal with both.
The Character Palette does a lot more than just letting you enter
symbols; it supports full Unicode, provides a nice way of searching
for particular Japanese or Chinese characters from the many thousands
that exist, lets you insert glyphs even if they aren't directly
supported in your current font, and so on. You can put it in your menu
bar by checking it in the Input Menu tab of the International pane in
System Preferences. It's definitely worth learning how to use
effectively.
-Jim
On Saturday, Sep 13, 2003, at 10:44 America/Chicago, rcohen wrote:
If I open TextEdit and look at the font choices, there is no choice
for "math" anything.
There is a choice of symbol font, but in fact it doesn't invoke the
symbol font.
Another responder (Tom Gewecke) notes that
"With 10.2 the only way to input from the Symbol font is via the
Character
Palette, not the keyboard (unless you create a custom keyboard for
it)."
This is not true for example in several applications (MS Office,
Canvass, ...) so they must have done something special. But it does
seem to be true for TextEdit, and thus apparently
the way generic apps work. What a step backwards.
-Ron Cohen-
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