Re: Special characters in menus
Re: Special characters in menus
- Subject: Re: Special characters in menus
- From: "John H. Jenkins" <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:02:12 -0600
On Mar 11, 2008, at 7:38 AM, William Bates wrote:
I have some menus containing special characters (of the sort found
in Dingbats or Apple Symbols). These were created in IB 3.0 by
simply using "Insert Character" from the Special Characters panel.
All works great until testing on some Tiger machines. Then, in the
menu display only, a few (not all) of the characters are substituted
with the "missing character" open rectangle.
In all probability, then, there are no fonts shipping with Tiger that
contain these characters. Apple Symbols, in particular, underwent an
*enormous* expansion in Leopard and added support for IIRC rather more
than a thousand new characters. Plus, of course, Arial Unicode was
added in Leopard.
I'm surprised that you're seeing open rectangles, however. If there
are no installed fonts which cover a character, I would have expected
that you would fall back through to the Last Resort font.
How is IB storing this font/character information? Is there some
system entity is looking at odd unicodes and deciding which font to
use? If so, what is that?
It's the font fallback mechanism in ATS (or CoreText, depending on the
vintage of the OS). This searches through the set of installed fonts
and makes an effort to find a font that can display the character
which is a reasonable match to the one you're trying to use. What
exactly it ends up doing depends on your specific font set up, the
text involved, your default locale, and a lot of other factors.
This is just a cosmetic fix but the menu display is going to send
Tiger users running for tech support, so I like to figure it now if
possible....
The only real choices are to modify the menus so that these characters
are no longer used or recommend the installation of a font like
Code2000 which is readily available, cheap, and covers most of the
Unicode BMP. Unfortunately, the best way to see if the default
installation on a Tiger machine will cover a particular character is
to use a Tiger machine with only the default fonts installed.
=====
John H. Jenkins
email@hidden
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