On Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:34:03 +0100 Johnny Rosenberg <[email protected]> dijo:
>I don't know what operating system you are running, but in mine, >Ubuntu 8.10, the character map (gucharmap) is installed by default. If >you have it, just copy the character, switch to the character map, >press Ctrl+f (find) and paste it there. Then hit the find button (or >is it Search?), the character will be found and there is the character >code. Just a word of warning about gucharmap. It displays the glyphs in the regular version of the font, but when you click on Italic, Bold, or Bold-Italic it does not go out and load the respective fonts. All it does is fake the attribute based on the regular version of the font. Thus, it may lead you to believe that a glyph is in the italic, bold or bold-italic versions of a font when the glyph is actually not there at all. I've been badly bitten by this in the past, therefore I never use gucharmap. >In case you don't have it, here they are (all the musical symbols are >located at U+1D100 β U+1D1FF): >π β U+1D11E >π β U+1D106 >π β U+1D107 >β― β U+266F >β β U+266D >π β U+1D101 >π β U+1D10E >π β U+1D102 > >Obviously β and β― are not among the musical symbols, and it was stupid >of me to bring them up in my example, since they are not among those >characters that disappear when switching to Bold. OK, looking in FontForge none of the glyphs are in any of the FreeSans fonts, not even the sharp and flat. In fact, I checked several other fonts that I have installed and didn't find any with those glyphs (although quite a number had the sharp and flat). I would suggest that you might have more reliable output from OOo if you actually set the musical characters with the font that OOo is stealing them from (Euterpe, or whatever it turns out to be). OOo has the marvelous ability to record macros, which can be assigned to keystrokes. So just turn on the macro recorder, insert the glyph (via its Unicode value), set it to the correct font, and save the macro. Assign the macro to a special keystroke (like Ctrl+Shift+something). Whenever you want that character just use the special keystroke. It will be faster and more reliable. >I actually think it's a good thing that missing characters are >substituted. I think the best thing was if every character was >included in every font, but I realise that it probably isn't >realistic. So it's great not having to have more than one font >selected in a text, even if there are a few extra symbols that are not >in the currently selected font. > >Some times when I look for new exiting fonts I get very disappointed >since only a few characters are included. I write most stuff in >Swedish (which is my main language) and as far as I have seen, >characters necessary for writing in Swedish (Γ₯Àâà ΓΓ) are missing >pretty often. Now, it doesn't help much to substitute them with the >same character form a different font, because they won't look right >anyway, but in some cases it will work to substitute missing >characters, for example those musical characters; it doesn't matter if >I ise FreeMono, FreeSans or FreeSerif, a g-clef will look the same >anyway. I understand that most users like the automatic glyph substitution. It's probably OK for the typical user. But I do a lot of desktop publishing. Substituting glyphs from another font is a serious no-no. More than once I have exported to PDF or PostScript from OOo and had characters that appeared on screen and printed fine to my laser printer disappear in the PDF or PS file. What if I sent the PDF or PS file to a print shop and didn't discover the missing characters until after thousands of copies had been printed? This is why desktop publishing apps like Scribus rigorously will never substitute glyphs. I wish there was a way to turn off the feature in OOo, but it's probably a bad idea to add a switch to turn it off. There would be endless complaints from users who inadvertently turn the feature off - "it used to work, why doesn't it work now?" or "it works in Word, why doesn't it work in Writer? - and on and on. I do wish there was documentation somewhere about how the feature works. I'd like to know just how OOo decides which font to steal the glyph from, for example. As for entering characters for Swedish, I am surprised that you are finding the glyphs missing in fonts. I know there are some fonts that deliberately do not support Eastern European languages, but Swedish should be supported by every Latin-based font. In fact, the Γ° and ΓΈ are also in just about every font I have. I do a lot of writing in linguistics, where I need a great many characters. My workhorse font is Junicode, which has everything needed for any Scandinavian language, it also has the complete set if IPA characters and combining diacriticals. It even has runes (all three varieties), just in case you want to write in authentic Anglo-Saxon. It doesn't have any of the musical characters, however, as it was designed for linguists and for people who work with ancient languages. >It also seems like the character map substitutes missing characters, >since no characters disappear when I change to FreeSans Bold. >Well, that's all the information I can think of right now anyway. Yes, I see you have discovered the same issue about gucharmap that I mentioned above. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
