Okay, that was a lot of text… ;D 2010/1/2 John Jason Jordan <johnjas...@gmail.com>: > On Fri, 1 Jan 2010 22:34:03 +0100 > Johnny Rosenberg <gurus.knu...@gmail.com> 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 – U+1D1FF): >>𝄞 → U+1D11E >>𝄆 → U+1D106 >>𝄇 → U+1D107 >>♯ → U+266F >>♭ → U+266D >>𝄁 → U+1D101 >>𝄎 → U+1D10E >>𝄂 → U+1D102 >> >>Obviously ♭ and ♯ 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).
Well… then there is another problem in this particular case. The spreadsheet I am working on is for creating a personal keyboard layout. ON one sheet I enter what characters I want on what key (4 different characters for each key, for example p=p, Shift+p=P, AltGr+p=π and Shift+AltGr+p=℗). The user just enter characters on that sheet, and another sheet konverts to the U+<hex> form and a third sheet converts from U+<hex> form to ”description form”, you know words like ”apostroph”, ”dead_macron” and so on, if they exists. The thing is not finished yet, but my idea is that a macro should create a keyboard variant adding lines to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/<the file of your choice, in my case ”se”>, /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.lst and /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev..xml (or actually first copy them to a local place and then add to the copy and then crate a script that the user can run for installing the new keyboard layout). So this needs to be easy to work with, like just entering characters to a spreadsheet and then pressing a button starting a macro and finally running the script for installation. I think that is advanced enough for most users… Maybe I can let the macro run the script too, I don't know yet if that's possible and safe and how to handle the user's password… > OOo has > the marvelous ability to record macros, Actually the macro recorder sucks, so I never use it, but please go on… ;D > 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. But I would need thousands of macros then, wouldn't I? I don't know which characters other users will want to use for their keyboard layouts… > >>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 (åäöÅÄÖ) 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. Yes, but I am probably more like ”most users” than a desktop publisher. But as I said earlier, the best thing would be if most fonts were complete. > > 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. Yes, that makes sense to me too. > > 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 think it's a good idea anyway. Just let the default be what most users want, place the switch somewhere in [Tools → Options] and do not assign a keyboard shortcut to it by default… > > 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. Yes, that would be very interesting. > 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 ð and ø are > also in just about every font I have. Well, most of the fonts I installed have åäöÅÄÖ, but when looking a places like ”1001 free fonts”, most of them lacks åäöÅÄÖ. I actually have some fonts installed from the standard Ubuntu repositories (I think) that lacks those characters. I'll look for a few of them right now… Aegyptus Akkadian Analecta Ani OpenSymbol Rachana Well, that's just a small selection… > > 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. Well, actually I have, for years now, been wondering WHY they do special italic and bold fonts. Why just not ”fake” it? In OpenOffice.org you can do that if you want to. You can even set the angle for italics so you can make reversed italics if you want to. Well, I figured out one reason for dedicated italic fonts. Take a look at a FreeSans ”a” (or Times New Roman or equivalent) and then look at the italic version. It's just more to it for some characters than just changing its leaning angle. Well, I feel that there is a lot to say about fonts… Johnny Rosenberg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.org
