Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 10:41 am Post subject: Latvian characters
When I use text with Latvian characters, they appear different from the rest of text. they also do not change when I apply 'italic' to the text. Can there be anything changed?
Most likely the font that you are using does not have any glyphs for Latvian characters. This causes Neo/J to search for a font that does have Latvian glyphs and Neo/J will use the first font found.
Which font are you using when you type Latvian characters?
Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:06 pm Post subject: Latvian characters
I used Times New Roman. Most characters (except s) are substituted by characters from Arial. Similar things happen in some other fonts, although I did not check too many. Some other work almost fine but omit the special characters in particular places or combinations, e.g., Zapfino. Is there a way to fix this that I can do?
PS. By mistake I posted this question in two places, sorry for this
I copied and pasted some Latvian text in from a webpage that I found and it I quickly experimented with a few different fonts. Here are a few fonts that appear to support Latvian characters:
Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 1:49 pm Post subject: latvian fonts
Those fonts in general look very similar that's why they seem to work. Bitstream Vera Sans definately uses some other characters which as I discovered are actually not Arial. I looked at several othe fonts. These seem to work as they are supposed:
Apple chancery
Apple symbols
Capitals
Charcoal
Chicago
Courier
Courier Bold
Dialog
Dialoglnput
Didot
Didot Bold
Didot Italic
futura Condensed Extra Bold
Futura Condensed Medium
Did not check further down my font list. But in case somebody can explain why this particular selection of fonts work and other do not work, it would be nice
Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 2:50 pm Post subject: Re: latvian fonts
bezvardis wrote:
Did not check further down my font list. But in case somebody can explain why this particular selection of fonts work and other do not work, it would be nice
Some fonts don't have Latvian characters because the creator of those fonts didn't include those characters. Most fonts include all of the ISO-8859-1 characters. However, for other characters it is hit and miss. For example, only a few Mac OS X fonts include Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Chinese, or Japanese characters.
It is because if the fact that most fonts do not include all possible characters that Neo/J does the automatic substitution of the font for characters not included in the selected font.
Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 9:32 am Post subject: Re: latvian fonts
pluby wrote:
It is because if the fact that most fonts do not include all possible characters that Neo/J does the automatic substitution of the font for characters not included in the selected font.
Note also that TextEdit, Safari, etc., all do the same thing.
There are several ways to see whether a font has the characters one needs. The OS's Character Palette (accessed via the "flag" menu) will let you select a character and then, at the bottom, show fonts on your system containing that character (you may have to flip some disclosure triangles to get the bottom fields to appear). There are shareware apps like UnicodeChecker and Unicode Font Info that do similar things (and more).
You should check out the TITUS Cyberbit font; it has just about the widest range of Unicode glyphs in a freely available font (and mimics the Times Roman style if you prefer working in a serif font!).
Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:22 pm Post subject: latvian fonts
Quote:
Note also that TextEdit, Safari, etc., all do the same thing.
I checked the TextEdit and there TimesNewRoman works OK. Does it mean it uses different font or just that it handles the font differently? It has all the italic and bold options workin. when I try the same in NeoOffice, it does not work.
Meanwhile I found another problem: I cannot write certain words, e.g. v'el'ak (that is the keystroke seqence, actualy a and e must have small horizontal dashes on top). While I am typing, the program suggests some ending of the word and changes what I am typing to a wrong version. I guess it has something to do with this system. can I switch it off somehow?
Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:34 pm Post subject: word completion
I found how to switch off word completion and now the problem is not there any more. Anyway - with the word completion function on certain words are impossible to write.
Posted: Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:46 pm Post subject: Re: latvian fonts
bezvardis wrote:
I checked the TextEdit and there TimesNewRoman works OK. Does it mean it uses different font or just that it handles the font differently? It has all the italic and bold options workin. when I try the same in NeoOffice, it does not work.
TextEdit is more sophisticated than Neo/J. TextEdit will change the font for entire blocks of text if the selected font does not have some characters. Neo/J will only change the problem characters. In TextEdit, if you highlight all of your text and change the font to Times New Roman, you will see that all characters except the Latvian characters are changed to Times New Roman.
bezvardis wrote:
Meanwhile I found another problem: I cannot write certain words, e.g. v'el'ak (that is the keystroke seqence, actualy a and e must have small horizontal dashes on top). While I am typing, the program suggests some ending of the word and changes what I am typing to a wrong version. I guess it has something to do with this system. can I switch it off somehow?
The autocomplete feature in Neo/J isn't that good with non-Western European languages. Unfortunately, I do not know how to turn off this feature.
Unless you have access to Office 2004 (or Office 200x on the PC), the MS fonts in your /Library/Fonts are old, "pre-Unicode" or "semi-Unicode" fonts with small numbers of non-Western European glyphs. Since Apple has been "bundling" the MS fonts with the OS since about OS 9, presumably the next major OS update (10.4) will include these fonts for everyone.
(Of course, if MS have not added AAT tables to their Mac fonts or Apple has not added complete OpenType support, then the MS fonts will break Arabic in Safari, but that's another issue....)
The once-freely-available "MS core fonts for web" that the Font Autopilot installs are essentially in the same state as the Mac versions bundled with the OS, pre- or semi-Unicode. The only way to get Times New Roman with a decent-sized set of glyphs is to have Office 2004 or a recent PC version of Office or Windows (though the license might prevent you from legally using the fonts from those versions on your Mac?).
(If it's not one thing, it's another.... )
For completeness sake (in case anyone is searching), word completion can be turned off in Tools>AutoCorrect/AutoFormat...>Word Completion tab. That was one of the first things I turned off with each new OOo or NeoJ install...it's not always that great with Western European languages, either !
For completeness sake (in case anyone is searching), word completion can be turned off in Tools>AutoCorrect/AutoFormat...>Word Completion tab. That was one of the first things I turned off with each new OOo or NeoJ install...it's not always that great with Western European languages, either !
True.. The software keeps suggesting english words when I am writing in Dutch. In any case, it somehow makes me feel like I am typing on a mobile phone.
But often, it remembers words I use often and then it is quite time saving. I only dislike when the software changes things afterwards. One of the main reasons I learned to hate MS Word (and yes, I know that too can be switched off).
Joined: May 31, 2003 Posts: 219 Location: French Alps
Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 5:39 am Post subject:
IIRC, for the autocomplete feature to works in the right language you must take care that the "language" setting of characters is correctly set. You can do it in the style panel or on a chunk basis with the "format characters" menu item. For sure, it also needs a dictionnary for the language you are using. This is unrelated to unicode issue wich nevertheless come in the way, especially for less usited language.
From my own experience, writing in French, OOo never suggested an English word if the setting is correct. But it's only able to suggest word used somewhere in an open document rather from dictionary.
Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 1:51 pm Post subject: Latvian characters
Max_Barel wrote:
From my own experience, writing in French, OOo never suggested an English word if the setting is correct. But it's only able to suggest word used somewhere in an open document rather from dictionary.
the problem was not that it suggested words from another language. Suggestions themselves were ok. It worked like that: I start typing a word, then it suggests something, I keep on typing and I need a special character, so I press ' (the dead key) and when I press the letter, the letter that I want is being changed to some thing else (e.g. a changes to m or like that). I found that it only happens in the process of suggestion. when I later went back in the middle of a text, deleted the wrong character and typed in the correct, it did not have the problem any more. When I switched the suggesting thing off, all was ok (save the main problem with unavailable fonts).
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The only way to get Times New Roman with a decent-sized set of glyphs is to have Office 2004 or a recent PC version of Office or Windows (though the license might prevent you from legally using the fonts from those versions on your Mac?).
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