Re: Fonts and open office
Re: Fonts and open office
- Subject: Re: Fonts and open office
- From: Jim Elliott <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2003 14:23:52 -0500
On Saturday, Sep 13, 2003, at 14:03 America/Chicago, rcohen wrote:
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.
Ah, yes, I appreciate your problem.
I guess it stems from the historical fact that in OS 9, with the lack
of Unicode, there was no systemic, valid way of supporting non-ASCII
fonts, so the only approach that was available was to cheat and create
fonts that pretended to be ASCII, but that mapped 65 to capital Alpha
rather than capital A, and so on. This led to the ability to switch to
that font and type in Greek, after learning the isomorphism that the
font happened to apply. And I can see why in typing math-heavy
documents, it would be a very helpful and efficient arrangement once
that learning curve had been surmounted.
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?
The problem is that OS X has a deep and pervasive understanding of how
glyphs relate to Unicode, and the keyboard maps to glyphs rather than
to ASCII values. So when you type an "A", it tries to find an A in the
current font, and the Symbol font doesn't have an A, it has an Alpha.
OS X knows the difference, OS 9 did not.
And there is that starting issue; I can't get a decent symbol font in
Open Office as a result.
I know Character Palette isn't the right answer for you, but for my own
edification, can you clarify what happens when you try to use it in
Open Office? Is it not available at all? Does the keyboard menu go away
when you switch to X applications?
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.
I think you're very much on the right track here. I think you or I (or
someone) needs to come up with a new input method that allows easy
keyboard access to Greek and mathematical symbols, much as Apple
provides the Kotoeri input method for easy (at least, as easy as
practicable) access to Japanese kanji glyphs. I will try and see if any
such beast already exists, or if I can find how to at least create a
script/keyboard menu entry.
If anyone else knows of such resources, please chime in.
The questions about whether you can access alternate scripts and/or the
character palette from Open Office do remain relevant though. Could you
tell me what happens when you try, as I don't have Open Office?
Thanks...
-Jim
-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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