Maridonna wrote:
I have no idea if it is UTF-8 compatible or not. It works fine in an
MS Word document but I have to switch back and forth between fonts.
These fonts are old-style ASCII hack fonts.
That is, the Coptic characters have the same values as normal Latin
ASCII character. They work fine in OpenOffice.org, as long as you
realize this. If you use these fonts and enter A you will get a Coptic
capital Alpha, if you enter B, you will get a Coptic capital Beta, and
so forth.
As you say, you only have to switch between fonts.
Some Unicode fonts with Coptic values are available at
http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Coptic.html . They have Unicode values,
as defined in http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf and
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2C80.pdf .
If you used these you would have to have some method of entering the
Unicode value for each character to type it into OpenOffice.org, or
paste it in from Insert → Special Character... or from some similar
outside utility.
I am not knowledgeable about how this is normally done on the Macintosh
by people who do this kind of thing, that is do a lot of input of
special characters instead of only a few on occasion.
But either kind of font should work fine in OpenOffice.org, just as it
did in Microsoft Office.
The Unicode method is generally preferred today because, for example,
Coptic capital Alpha has a unique value and can never get confused with
Latin capital A which has a separate unique value.
So you can use one font and the values will appear properly in every
OpenOffice.org module, provided this single font has both the Latin
values you need and the Coptic values you need. It will also appear
properly on the web.
If you use your current Coptic fonts, as Drew has indicated, you will
have to accept that outside of forms and reports you will see all of
your data in Latin script or all of your data in Coptic script.
You can switch back and forth at any time, of course.
And in Forms and Reports you can use different fonts than you use
elsewhere in Base and can assign one column to Coptic and one column to
Latin as you wish (though in Unicode terms both columns will have Latin
values).
Or you can use Unicode fonts, and avoid this switching, provided you can
find a decent way to enter the Unicode Coptic values. You may be able to
create a Coptic keyboard on the Macintosh.
See http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pinax/coptic.html for a discussion of
how to enter Unicode Coptic both in Windows and on the Macintosh (though
this applies to OS X, and is likely somewhat out of date now).
Jim Allan
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