No worries Max. I did not mean to be grammatically picky. FWIW my French is so shaky I always wonder if I'll enjoy what I ordered:)
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Futhermore, what I intended to pinpoint is that I use the OS X palette, not the Neo/J one. The native palette you find in the Apple menu from the menu bar, and only if you have the option checked in the International preference panel.
I realized that after I made that guest post and couldn't edit it. At that point, I hadn't actually seen the Character Palate when running NeoJ because OS X kept losing the setting:(
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So it turn out that no Cocoa app' behave as you expect, since there is no mapping between normal fonts and dingbats. In my opinion this is a correct behaviour. Then the lack for a special kybd for symbols. Carbon apps behave the old way. The funny ? point is that Neo/J use Java 1.3 which, in turn, is said to use Carbon and 1.4 Cocoa :?:
You are correct. I simply did not realize that Cocoa apps behaved the way they do with respect to special character fonts like Symbol and Zapf Dingbats. And Cocoa apps do not meet my expectations for a clear and consistent user interface.
IMO the Character Palate is a UI kludge at best. I understand the problem of needing some way to input characters that are not on the keyboard but at least the font selection and character input UI should be consistent and if possible intuitive. Selecting characters in a document and then selecting a different font from a font menu, should display the selected characters in the font I chose NOT switch to a completely different font. BTW the resulting font is different depending on the starting font. Having special character fonts mixed in with regular fonts in the same font menu seems bound to lead to confusion. As you point out, the special symbol/dingbat fonts no longer function like 'normal' fonts, so at least group them together in the menu as a hint to the user.
I guess the big improvement of NeoJ running native in OS X came with a price of inheriting the partial unicode implementation of Cocoa apps and inconsistencies in font handling :( Oh well, the rest is nice;)
I think we're all clear here, but just to make sure: I, too, was referring to the OS's Character Palette when I mentioned using it to insert Zapf Dingbats characters in NeoJ (and edited my first post to reflect that). I wasn't even aware NeoJ had a character palette.
asxless wrote:
I guess the big improvement of NeoJ running native in OS X came with a price of inheriting the partial unicode implementation of Cocoa apps and inconsistencies in font handling Oh well, the rest is nice;)
-- asxless
I agree completely with the rest of your post--the Character Palette and related UI is a mess--but it's Carbon apps that only have partial Unicode support (at least by default) and Cocoa ones that are fully Unicode, even if that Unicode behavior doesn't seem logical
On the other hand, you wouldn't expect to type something using a Roman kybd and then switch to an Arabic font and have your text become Arabic
Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 2:54 am Post subject: Symbol & Dingbats kybd layouts
OK, last post for the night....
First, I was a bit wrong; Apple classifies the Symbol and Dingbats layouts as "Roman" in script rather than "Unicode," go figure. Second, I could not find the layouts in my 10.2 install CD, so maybe I was imagining that, too.
Drop them in you ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout, and enjoy. Select the appropriate font and layout and type at will (TextEdit, NeoJ, and any other Cocoa app, I presume). Hope this helps, at least as an interim work-around, those who need to type in these fonts.
Last edited by sardisson on Sun Mar 29, 2009 7:31 pm; edited 2 times in total
I think we're all clear here, but just to make sure: I, too, was referring to the OS's Character Palette when I mentioned using it to insert Zapf Dingbats characters in NeoJ (and edited my first post to reflect that). I wasn't even aware NeoJ had a character palette. :-)
I was just the opposite: a lot of experience Beta testing OOo (X11) left me with both detailed knowledge of OOo's font issues/work-arounds & Special Character palate and incorrect expectations for that functionality in a native OS X implementation:(
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...it's Carbon apps that only have partial Unicode support (at least by default) and Cocoa ones that are fully Unicode, even if that Unicode behavior doesn't seem logical :-
Agreed -- my "partial implementation" jab was aimed at the UI not the underlying Unicode support:)
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...Drop them in your ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts, logout, and enjoy. Select the appropriate font and layout and type at will (TextEdit, NeoJ, and any other Cocoa app, I presume). Hope this helps, at least as an interim work-around, those who need to type in these fonts.
Thanks a bunch. Using these keyboard layouts to input symbols and dingbats makes more sense (at least to me). They also make the Keycaps app useful for visualizing the keyboards. For most Cocoa apps you can use Keycaps to capture the keystrokes AND font then just copy and paste. Unfortunately copy and paste from the Keycaps app doesn't quite work as expected with NeoJ-- only one character seems to make it from Keycaps into NeoJ and it's not one of the ones I typed. But I'm not going there;)
Thanks again to you and Max for pointing out the underlying misconception that lead me down my personal and painfully public, path to OS X Cocoa font implementation enlightenment.
Just a final point of clarification on this (ironic that asxless just mentioned this thread in another one): it seems the Symbol/Dingbats keyboards were in 10.0 and 10.1, so I wasn't completely hallucinating.
I passed across this tidbit on Tom Geweke's fabulous Multilingual Mac page (probably the original source of my knowledge on the Symbol/Dingbats under X):
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In OS X, Symbol and Zapf Dingbat characters are also produced using Unicode fonts, so that special keyboards (10.1) or the Character Palette (10.2) need to be activated in order to type them (you cannot just select the font as was possible in OS 9). This is explained in TIL 106731. If you need Wingdings-like symbols, use the Webdings font and look in the Unicode Private Use range in the Character Palette.
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Oh well, the rest is nice;)
