Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 7:20 am Post subject: Webdings
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
I know I have been part of a similar topic before around Dingbats, but now the issue is Corefonts such as Webdings not showing up in NO 3.3 beta (and previous issues).
Webdings works fine for me so please tell us the Mac OS X version you are using and attach a sample document and/or the steps to reproduce what you see.
Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 561 Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 8:24 am Post subject:
I see this too. But is it a problem with NeoOffice or with the fonts.
None of the following fonts show up in TextEdit's font list and if you select Show Font… from the Text Edit font menu they are not rendered there correctly either.:
These are also the fonts that do not show correctly in NeoOffice Beta 3.3.
A separate issue that I have noticed is that the NeoOffice font menu goes blank when scrolling at speed with an Apple Wireless Mouse. This is the menu that pops up within the Writer window with all the fonts rendered in it. It goes blank the scroll indicator stops then jumps to a new position and the font names re-appear.
A separate issue that I have noticed is that the NeoOffice font menu goes blank when scrolling at speed with an Apple Wireless Mouse. This is the menu that pops up within the Writer window with all the fonts rendered in it. It goes blank the scroll indicator stops then jumps to a new position and the font names re-appear.
You have "show font previews" enabled? If so, the first time you scroll through the entire list you are forcing Mac OS X to load every font on your system. That can be a huge load on your system and is why the default for NeoOffice and the Mac OS X native font dialog in other applications is to only display the font name and not render a preview of the font.
Also, what are you trying to do with Webdings font? It is a symbol font and has no glyphs for regular characters so you won't see a preview of that font. If you are trying to type regular text with that font, all input will fallback to a normal, non-symbol font.
Is there still some other issue that I have not addressed above? Neither of the above are new issues and have existed in Mac OS X since it was first released over a decade ago: loading all fonts can overload your system and not all fonts have glyphs for your language.
I just want to reiterate what Patrick has said: we need a much more detailed description of the problem.
All of the characters in the Webdings font (at least the version 1.01 shipped with Mac OS X 10.5., aside from basic ASCII, are located in the Private Use Area. That means to input them in NeoOffice--or any other modern, Unicode app--you need to use either
1) the OS Character Palette, or
2) a special, custom keyboard layout (I don't know of one for Webdngs; there is one for standard Unicode dingbats, aka Zapf Dingbats, though), or
3) an application's own character picker (in NeoOffice, Insert: Special Character; then select "Private Use Area" from the right-side pop-up menu, and then scroll down until you get to U+F021, which is where Webdings begin).
Edit: If the problem is that you're using one of the methods above and the Webdings/Windings characters still aren't showing up in NeoOffice, then we'll need to know more info, such as the version of your font, the version of Mac OS X, and how you're inserting the character, to start.
Edit 2: :sigh: I thought we had a wiki article on the Symbol/Dingbats + Unicode issue, but we don't. This section in the Greek article is relevant, though.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Sorry for the slowness in reply - I am online once a day while on vacation.
I am currently testing the 3.3 beta on Snow Leopard on an 1.1 MacBook.
The Webding font test has been with all versions through to the latest for Win7.
As with NO 2.x, I had thought I could get automatic recognition by putting the fonts in the profile - but no success.
I am glad to see that there was not a wiki, because like you I thought there was one and could not find it.
The issue is similar to the Dingbat thread in which I participated a couple of years ago. NO uses the OS X font system while OpenOffice (LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice) have a workaround/hack which permits the user to see the font characters without having to use insert character. With NO in the case of the Dingbats, one selected Dingbats from the subsets and had the character list. From the replies, I see one used Private User area to get the same effect with Webdings.
The issue was brought to my attention on the OpenOffice user forum by a user about to leave NO because the Webdings previously inserted in a file were not visible in more recent releases of NO.
The issue was brought to my attention on the OpenOffice user forum by a user about to leave NO because the Webdings previously inserted in a file were not visible in more recent releases of NO.
My objective in all this is to keep promoting NO.
Maybe you have not seen this. To be blunt, promotion is not what we need or want.
I still have no idea what the issue is from your post. I asked for a sample document and/or specific steps to reproduce and, instead, your post is that some random (clearly low or no paying) user on the web is threatening to use something else. Using your posting privileges to funnel other people's problems to our forum is really not appropriate so please think twice before you do that.
Note: I have spit amayze's posts about failure to insert characters from the Mac OS X Character Palette, and the associated hangs he's seen, into its own thread here. (That's still one too many subjects for a topic, but I couldn't find a good way to split those two apart )
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Maybe you have not seen this. To be blunt, promotion is not what we need or want.
Yes, I have seen this.
The issue is a file created with NO will not open correctly with the latest versions of NO when using the Webding font. I have now attached a file created in NO 2.4 using the Webding font. This file opens correctly in Apache Open Office 3.4.1 (development release) and LibreOffice 3.5.4. It does not open properly in NO 3.3 beta.
Thank you for the sample document. I was able to see the "problem" you were describing. Unfortunately for you, the behavior in NeoOffice 3.3 is correct, and the behavior in NeoOffice 2.x and in OOo/LO is incorrect.
PGAGA wrote:
The issue is a file created with NO will not open correctly with the latest versions of NO when using the Webding font. I have now attached a file created in NO 2.4 using the Webding font. This file opens correctly in Apache Open Office 3.4.1 (development release) and LibreOffice 3.5.4. It does not open properly in NO 3.3 beta.
I'm not sure why it "works" right in NeoOffice 2.x, perhaps because the old ATSUI font/text API had a kludge to support the old-style (Mac OS, pre-Unicode, incorrect) behavior. I believe OOo and LO still use this old, deprecated API, while NeoOffice 3.2 and above use the modern CoreText font API.
If you open your sample document in Apple's TextEdit, then you will see the same appearance as in NeoOffice 3.2.x and 3.3 Beta.
The reason is as I noted in the above post (Webdings glyphs have codepoints in the Private Use Area) and in the section of the wiki article I referenced earlier:
NeoWiki wrote:
Because Mac OS X is based on Unicode, an international standard designed improve the interoperability of data which gives each character in each of the world's languages a distinct "code point", g and γ are treated as two different characters (as they rightly are). Simply entering one character and changing the font does not transform it into the other.
The same thing is true for dingbat-type fonts: A and (0xf041) are not the same character with a slightly different appearance in two fonts; they are two completely different characters. The only way to get two applications, or applications of two separate users, to display the same character universally is to use the unique Unicode code point for the character. For instance, in the pre-Unicode world, if you had sent me that document and I did not have the Webdings font, I would have still seen an "A", not the stylized crane (or whatever piece of machinery that is), and your intended meaning would have been lost.
At any rate, the NeoOffice behavior is correct, and if you want to continue to use Webdings successfully in modern applications, you'll have to enter those glyphs using one of the methods described in my previous post.
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
I'm not sure why it "works" right in NeoOffice 2.x, perhaps because the old ATSUI font/text API had a kludge to support the old-style (Mac OS, pre-Unicode, incorrect) behavior. I believe OOo and LO still use this old, deprecated API, while NeoOffice 3.2 and above use the modern CoreText font API.
Correct. All versions of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice use the old ATSUI text layout functions which Apple "deprecated" several years ago. "Deprecated" means that Apple has given fair warning that at some point in the near future, those functions will not be included in a new Mac OS X version. When Apple stops including the legacy ATSUI functions, any application that uses the ATSUI functions will no longer launch so we replaced all of our ATSUI code with Apple's Core Text functions a year and half ago.
Apple's Core Text functions do not support the old Mac Classic, pre-Unicode behaviors and, as a result, neither does NeoOffice.
ATSUI (still used by Word, LO, etc.) will be removed from Mac OS X within the next few versions. It is best to move away from any reliance on that for all applications, especially if it's something as trivial as bullets.
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, aside from basic ASCII, are located in the Private Use Area. That means to input them in NeoOffice--or any other modern, Unicode app--you need to use either
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