On Sun, 23 Aug 2009 10:11:34 -0400 John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> dijo:
> On Sunday 23 August 2009 06:02:08 Professor Rodney Coates wrote: > > I have Scribus 1.3.5.1 running on a 17" Powerbook under OS-X 10.5.7 > > > > The Symbol font will not display; Zapf Dingbats will not display; > > Render Frame will not work (). Latex/Tex is not working/available > For your use I suggest e.g, Lyx, which is semi-wysiwyg and TeX based > or else TeX itself. Scribus is not optimized of your purposes. TeX > is. > I use both Scribus and pdftex, each for the kinds of tasks for which > it is best suited. If you don't need the Lyx interface then > pdflatex or Context would be the tex variants to look at. > > Scribus is being rapidly developed. In the future may of the features > you need may be added. But I wouldn't use it for the kind of work > you have in front of you. TeX is there, TeX is stable, and TeX has > the features you need. Professor Coates' first problem is fundamentally a font issue. Many programs literally substitute a glyph from another font when the font the user has selected lacks the glyph. I find this behavior reprehensible. I understand why developers of office applications designed them to do this - the average office user doesn't even know how to install a font on their computer, let alone how to use them. I recently went to a class on phonetics at the request of the professor in order to explain to the class how to use the International Phonetic Alphabet on their computers. One student complained that she followed the written instructions but after dropping the font into the fonts folder on her Windows computer it did not work. She didn't know that she needed to unzip it first. Half the students in the class had similar issues that most on this list would consider idiot level problems. And this was a graduate level class. Scribus will never substitute a glyph from another font. That is by design because it is essential for print work. I have found Scribus to be religious in this matter, and I am glad of it. It would be a disaster to discover after a job comes off the press that a glyph did not print. However, I was recently bitten by having a glyph fail to appear. The glyph appeared and printed fine from OpenOffice.org Writer, and it even appeared in Scribus in the Story Editor. But it failed to appear in the text frame. After much frustration I discovered that Writer was substituting the glyph from another font, and was not even telling me that it was doing so. Scribus was corrrect (although the Story Editor needs work in this respect). Somewhere I read that recent versions of the MacOS substitute glyphs system-wide. That may be a contributing factor to Professor Coates' problem. But consider that comment utter hearsay. I have never used a Mac. The Unicode value for Greek lambda is 3BB - ?. If the lambda does not appear at the end of the preceding sentence, then the font you are using in your mail client probably does not contain the glyph. I would suggest copying and pasting the sentence into Scribus. If the lambda does not appear, apply different fonts to the sentence. And rather than selecting a Symbol font, just use the same font you are using for the body text. Many fonts these days contain at least the basic Greek characters in addition to the glyphs needed for writing other European languages. Regarding TeX, LaTeX, Lyx and fellow travelers, one or more of them may be much better suited to the work that Professor Coates needs to do. Indeed, TeX was originally created for academic papers in math and science. However, the TeX family are not WYSIWIG, not even the front ends like Lyx. I find them frustrating. And I have never heard any TeX user claim that it is easy to learn. But brains don't come off an assembly line. In the end only Professor Coates can decide which tool clicks best for him.
