Different Alphabets/Symbols

[cwcraw]

I need to use a number of different symbols and alphabets in formula and writer. Where can I find a complete greek alphabet, International phonetic alphabet, and physics symbol set (hbar particularly) for writer and formula.

[OPENSTEP]

A standard lower & uppercase greek alphabet is contained in the OpenSymbol font that comes with OOo. While using the forumula editor, click on the Symbols toolbar button (it's a Sigma that'll be buried somewhere in that rats nest of toolbar buttons). You can then insert greek chars in the formula.

For the others you'll need to find a truetype font that has them. You then have to set the font for that part of the equation to that font and type in the character directly. There is an hbar in OpenSymbol (u210F), though I always drew my bar as a diagonal

I don't know of any easy way to extend the equation editor built-in symbol names to include new symbols, however, as it appears to only allow for modification of which characters are associated with existing names in the %name equation syntax.

ed

[cwcraw]

Yeah, I just overlooked the hbar. However my greek alphabet was malfunctioning. I figured it out though. Thanks for the advice.

[OPENSTEP]

If you want a different set of letters then opensymbol, I'm pretty sure that you can also use the font mapping to redirect opensymbol to a translated built-in Symbol.

On Panther machines, the OpenSymbol font included with 103GM doesn't appear properly and greek letters won't appear (along with bullets and other dingbats). You'll need to get a newer version of the font from 1.1. I'm pretty sure there's a topic somewhere else in the forum on it, but if you have problems finding it just holler and I can put it up on the FTP site

ed

[alexliz]

I have a similar problem to cwcraw.

I am Greek and live and work in Greece. I get incoherent behavior in OOo 1.0.3. I open MSOffice XP or TextEdit (OS X 10.3.3) files with greek text in OOo. The greek text might show up as boxes, or as correct greek text which has been messed up format wise (ie it might appear bold/italic etc when it shouldn't etc.) or it might appear as the correct characters but without the accents in lower case characters.

Conversely, when I type within OOo, I can select some of the fonts which will show greek text (which will also be properly read in TextEdit etc if not in the correct format) but I *cannot* type the accentuated lower case vowels of the greek language; instead I get the english semi-colon character followed by the vowel I pressed.

This difficulty renders OOo pretty much useless for me, being a translator who has to have proper greek output. I read in the post by The One about the font OpenSymbol, but it didn't come with my OOo. Also, I seem to remember from the first time I installed OOo (I had to uninstall/reinstall it twice to get it to start with Coool eventually...) that during the installation process there was a session of 'conversion' of my system fonts (which support greek nicely through a patch called XGreek from www.vodkatini.gr on my Panther); this session didn't take place during the last install (or if it did it happened so fast that I didn't notice).

Hope I've given some background for someone to help. Any tips are appreciated.

[OPENSTEP]

Offhand, do you know if the Mac Greek fonts have a different type of font encoding from the MacRoman encoding? Even if fonts are converted through fondu in the conversion process, OOo X11 can still only deal with the standard font encodings. There's a known limitation of functionality for Asian fonts, and if the Greek fonts have a different encoding they might not work either.

If it does turn out to be font encoding, the only workaround I can think of is to try and get Unix opentype fonts or Windows truetype fonts to use to get the proper symbols. The OpenOffice.org code should be able to understand the encodings used by those platforms. I think people have used this successfully with Hebrew fonts, but I may be mistaken.

ed