Joined: Sep 28, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: US + Lithuania
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 1:35 pm Post subject:
This is strange, I never noticed. I use NeoOffice a lot for Lithuanian text, but I usually use Times instead of Times New Roman. I like it better, but now that you mentioned this, I tried Times New Roman, and the same thing happens with Lithuanian characters, each ąčęėįÅ¡ųūž becomes different (more bold or something), but when I highlight such letters the font is still said to be Times New Roman.
In TextEdit, all characters look the same in Times New Roman. When I switch to a font that cannot handle Lithuanian characters, and start typing them, font changes to Lucida Grande. I typed some Lithuanian in NeoOffice in Lucida Grande, and it seems identical to Lithuanian characters supposedly in Times New Roman. So I'm convinced that's the font everything gets substituted with.
I tried checking the Latvian symbols. Switched to the Latvian keyboard, but I don't seem to find the keys where all the characters are. In LT keyboard, all special characters are on the line of numbers, so that's where I looked first . Then I understood what you meant by the "dead key" and managed to find Å¡ and ā characters to check. They seem just fine in Times and Lucida Grande, although Verdana did not get the ā right...
Joined: Sep 28, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: US + Lithuania
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 1:53 pm Post subject:
One more thing, BezVardis,
You might want to check out FontDoc 1.0, a free utility that will show you a custom text in every font on your sistem. That should give you a quick idea of which font can handle Latvian characters.
I just did a check on the Lithuanian characters in FontDoc myself. Times New Roman and Verdana appear to dispay them just fine, no problems, which is the case in TextEdit. I have Office 2004, and Word didn't seem to suffer from this "disability" of NeoOffice as well.
Strange...
P.S. I never use word completion as for Lithuanian texts it's useless except for days of the week or months
I just did a check on the Lithuanian characters in FontDoc myself. Times New Roman and Verdana appear to dispay them just fine, no problems, which is the case in TextEdit. I have Office 2004, and Word didn't seem to suffer from this "disability" of NeoOffice as well.
Office 2004 ships with Unicode versions of Times New Roman, etc., so chances are those fonts have all the Baltic characters in them. If one has not shelled out the hundreds of dollars to get Office 2004 (or otherwise has access to it), then the Times New Roman, etc., fonts on one's Mac date from the mid-/late-90s and are pre-Unicode with very limited character sets. This could explain why bezvardis has a problem and you don't. Similarly, Apple's Times, etc., are Unicode fonts with better glyph support, so that can explain why Times works and Times NR doesn't for some glyphs.
Quoting myself:
sardisson wrote:
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.
The character palette, available from the International (flag) menu also can show what fonts support a given glyph (you'll need to expand the "font variation" disclosure triangle). I also use Unicode Font Info and UnicodeChecker at times.
Joined: Sep 28, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: US + Lithuania
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 3:26 pm Post subject:
sardisson wrote:
Office 2004 ships with Unicode versions of Times New Roman, etc., so chances are those fonts have all the Baltic characters in them.
I'm sorry if I'm completely missing the point here, but my understanding is that applications use the fonts from the Library folders (System's or my own), and we use fonts that come with Mac OS, which has a lot of fonts in Unicode versions.
For example, recently I downloaded a free Central European font and put it into my ~/Library/Fonts/ folder. Now I can use it in TextEdit and NeoOffice and they display all characters OK. One weird thing I noticed about it in MS Word (which I normally try to avoid) is that whenever I tried typing a Lithuanian character, it would switch the font back to Times NR, but if I later highlighted the whole "Times NR-distorted" sentence and changed the font back to the new one, it would render correctly. Oh well, I don't like Word anyway. NeoOffice rendered all characters just fine.
sardisson wrote:
If one has not shelled out the hundreds of dollars to get Office 2004
Or: if one goes to school that practically forces you to use it and provides it...
Office 2004 ships with Unicode versions of Times New Roman, etc., so chances are those fonts have all the Baltic characters in them.
I'm sorry if I'm completely missing the point here, but my understanding is that applications use the fonts from the Library folders (System's or my own), and we use fonts that come with Mac OS, which has a lot of fonts in Unicode versions.
Maybe I misunderstood you? Yes, apps use fonts from the various Fonts folders (there are 5!). Included among those that come with the Mac OS X (installed by default) are old, 1990s, pre-Unicode versions of the MS fonts...I don't have Office, but I have TimesNR, etc., in my /Library/Fonts folder. So when a collegaue sends me a paper written in Word on a PC in Times NR and that uses "Latin-Extended" characters for Turkish, for instance, I saw boxes in Neo/J 0.x and the characters in Lucida Grande in 1.1 Alpha 2 (font substitution).
But Office 2004 installs new Unicode versions of those fonts in one's Fonts folder, so if I were to send you the same document, you'd see the Turkish characters in TimesNR since you have Office 2004 That's all I was trying to say.
sjolit wrote:
sardisson wrote:
If one has not shelled out the hundreds of dollars to get Office 2004
Or: if one goes to school that practically forces you to use it and provides it...
Don't know if that's good or bad At least they provide it if they're "forcing" its use. I'm lucky? to be at a fairly sw-agnostic school, but still get too many .doc .xls attachments and sometimes have to collaborate (hoorah Neo/J!), but only faculty can get Office for free.
All I want are the *^%&^%*&^ Unicode versions of those fonts so I can read and PDF the documents without boxes or font changes...so as I noted before, hopefully Apple will include the Unicode versions of the MS fonts in 10.4 rather than the old 1990s ones
Joined: Sep 28, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: US + Lithuania
Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 6:16 pm Post subject:
sardisson wrote:
But Office 2004 installs new Unicode versions of those fonts in one's Fonts folder
Oh, so you're saying when I installed Office 2004 it replaced some fonts in my font folder?.. I didn't know it messed with them at all.
But does that explain that I still see Unicode characters in Lucida Grande when I try typing them in Times NR in Neo (it shouldn't be happening if Office 2004 upgraded my fonts)? And it doesn't happen with Times, so I would guess Mac OS X does have some newer Unicode versions of fonts. Or maybe that's only because Office 2004 somehow upgraded Times and not Times NR... I wouldn't know.
sardisson wrote:
but only faculty can get Office for free.
I should have been more explicit. Being a graduate student qualifies me for some software from our department for free once I'm part of a research group NeoOffice is primarily for my extracurricular activities and education of my family.
Posted: Thu Dec 09, 2004 10:38 pm Post subject: Latvian characters: replacement is solution
I also found out that Times work fine. But I have a lot of MS Office files where I used Times NR. Whenever I opened those files, all the Latvian characters were in different font.
I used Tools>Options>NeoOffice/J>Fonts and set to replace Times NR with Times. That fixed the problem.
Now all the documents open nicely
Of course the fact that we are locked in a very limited number of fonts remains
Joined: Sep 18, 2003 Posts: 434 Location: London, UK
Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 8:58 am Post subject:
sjolit wrote:
But does that explain that I still see Unicode characters in Lucida Grande when I try typing them in Times NR in Neo (it shouldn't be happening if Office 2004 upgraded my fonts)? And it doesn't happen with Times, so I would guess Mac OS X does have some newer Unicode versions of fonts. Or maybe that's only because Office 2004 somehow upgraded Times and not Times NR... I wouldn't know.
Check and see if you have two* versions of Times NR installed (e.g. use Font Book or do it manually by checking your /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts folders). It could be that Neo/J is preferring the system level TNR (without the Unicode support) over what I would guess to be a user level Office installed TNR (with the Unicode support). If you do have both, simply disable the system level one and replace it with the Office 2004 supplied one.
* Or three if you also have a Classic system folder installed!
Times is not an MS supplied font - it comes standard with the OS. _________________ PBG4, 1.5GHz, SuperDrive, 1GB RAM, 128MB VRAM, 5400rpm 80GB HD, MacOS X 10.4.5
Joined: Sep 28, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: US + Lithuania
Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 1:37 pm Post subject:
JKT wrote:
Check and see if you have two* versions of Times NR installed
...
If you do have both, simply disable the system level one and replace it with the Office 2004 supplied one.
Perfect! That seems to have solved the problem.
I had Times NR in my ~/Library/Fonts as well as in the system library folder. Removing the one in the system library made all characters appear correcty.
Thanks a lot, JKT!
P.S. Bezvardi, try that if you have Office 2004. If you don't, ummm, maybe I can send you my Times NR that seems to be "unicodized" and works well.
Joined: Sep 28, 2004 Posts: 25 Location: US + Lithuania
Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2004 2:35 pm Post subject:
sjolit wrote:
I had Times NR in my ~/Library/Fonts as well as in the system library folder. Removing the one in the system library made all characters appear correcty.
I'm sorry, I lied. The Times NR I removed was not in /System/Library/Fonts but in /Library/Fonts folder. Anyway, that's the only other copy I had apart from the updated one in ~/Library/Fonts.
FYI: If you hover the cursor over the font in FontBook (click the triangle to expand the list to show all copies/faces), a tooltip will show you the font location and the font's version, making it easy to see which is new and which is old--in the event that newer/older ones are in different places on everyone's Macs.
Good catch, JKT; I'd forgotten about the duplicate fonts issue.
Also note that if you need to keep older, pre-Unicode fonts available for apps to use under Classic, you can disable them in FontBook so that OS X won't see them and cause problems, but they will still be available for Classic apps without having to move fonts in and out of folders, etc.
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. Then I understood what you meant by the "dead key" and managed to find Å¡ and ā characters to check. They seem just fine in Times and Lucida Grande, although Verdana did not get the ā right...
That's all I was trying to say.
NeoOffice is primarily for my extracurricular activities and education of my family.