On 2 Jan 2006, at 11:39, G. Roderick Singleton wrote: > On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 05:44 +0100, Martin S wrote: > > Are there plans to include OpenType (.otf) support in OpenOffice? > > It is in the queue. Please see > http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=37073
<Mostly addressing Martin's question> I use OO.o 1.9.193 on my Ubuntu-64 Breezy laptop to write things for linguistics projects. There are limitations, but until Scribus gets decent tables OO.o is the best out there. Regarding fonts, assuming you can tolerate the religio-political issues, Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) has some solutions. But before running off and installing the fonts they make available for free, there are some things to understand. The first fonts available for linguistics worked like Doulos, that is, special characters were mapped to the regular keyboard. The font was supplied with a "template," which was really just a document showing how the characters were mapped. Thus, for example, the esh was mapped to the uppercase S. You selected the Doulos font, then typed a capital S, and you got an esh. This worked fine except for a couple of problems. First, there are way more characters in a decent IPA font than there are keyboard characters. Second, because they mapped characters to the standard keyboard, the standard characters were not available. They got around this by designing the font to match another font that everyone would have. E.g., Doulos is a Times Roman look-alike (well, close anyway). Thus, for regular typing you would use Times, but you would switch to Doulos when you needed an IPA character. The ultimate solution to the above problems is Unicode. There are now several IPA fonts available with Unicode compliant mapping (Gentium, Charis, both available free from SIL). These work like regular fonts for everyday typing. When you need an IPA character you don't have to leave the font. You just use Insert Special Character and scroll to find the character you need. Or, on Windows, if you know the decimal value of the character you can enter it with keystrokes, Alt+0+decimal. On Linux you can use Ctrl-Shift+hex. Now as to the stacking issue, Unicode does not really solve this problem, nor does OpenType, as it is part of how the font has been created. However, if you use one of the Unicode fonts I mentioned above (Gentium, Charis), there is a workaround. Unicode has slots for lots of possibilities, including preformed characters with stacking diacritics. For example, hex 01D6 is a u with dieresis and macron stacked. Unfortunately, I did not see the i with dieresis and macron stacked (in Charis), but it might be there. I'm too lazy to go look up the Unicode settings to see if there is a slot for that possibility.) As an alternative, you can play with the superscript options. For example, type the i with macron (hex 012B), then switch to superscript and set the position at, say, 20% above, and the size at 100%, then insert the combining diacritic for the dieresis. I haven't actually tried this (still lazy), but in theory it should work. I should also add that it is considered acceptable practice by most linguists to put the diacritic either under or above the character. Thus, you might insert the i with dieresis and stack the macron underneath it, or vice- versa. (I do this all the time for things like voiceless g, where the normal position underneath would smash into the descender - I just use the voiceless diacritic above the g.) You may already be aware of what I said, so I don't know if any of this helps. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
