Hello Vika,
On May 10, 2005, at 8:23 AM, John Brownie wrote:
At 07:29 -0400 7/5/05, Vika Gardner wrote:I am trying to get functional Unicode diacritics (for
Persian/Arabic/Chaghatai) using Nisus Writer Express 2.1.3 (:-).
I know how to type them, but only some of the fonts, despite the
Keyboard viewer showing the existence of the correct diacritics
for that font when selected (option-a for macron, option-h for
under-line, option-x for under-dot), when typed the serif fonts
largely revert to a non-serif (arial?) letter. Vowels with
macrons seem to default to a serif face, consonants to a
san-serif (and wow, does that make for ugly words!). This
despite the fact that the font name in NEx (Tools, Formatting, Font Family) continues to show the font originally selected.
It sounds like the font that you're using doesn't really have those diacritics. You are getting the "font fallbacks" coming into play, and you're probably getting Lucida Grande for the characters that don't come in your font. Actually, to be more precise, you may have the diacritics with some characters, but not all, in your font. In other words, you might have a with a macron, but not s with a macron, as macrons are more likely to be on vowels, so that the font designers haven't done the less likely combinations.
I think John's reply answers your question. The tricky part is that, as you write, "This despite the fact that the font name in NEx (Tools, Formatting, Font Family) continues to show the font originally selected"; according to Nisus people, this is a *feature*. For most users, like you and I, this is simply very misleading. I think you can find the "real font" used in the selected text if you open the font panel, with Command + T. Or, it is more intuitive in TextEdit: you copy your text in NWE, paste it in a TextEdit window, and look at the used font...
As you write:
I downloaded Gentium from the web, and this works perfectly, but it doesn't have a bold. Arial Unicode downloaded from Brill also seems to work correctly.
You can find more large Unicode fonts in <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts_macosx.html>. Gandhari Unicode may be a good alternative (<http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/software.php>); you may try also Thryomanes that you can download from <http://members.tripod.com/Thryomanes/fonts.html>. And also TimesTL, by Kino, from <http://quinon.com/files/encoding/>...
Best regards,
Nobumi Iyanaga Tokyo, Japan
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