Central European characters and OS X fonts

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Central European characters and OS X fonts

Could anybody tell me is there any way to obtain the fonts commonly used in Mac OS X (e.g. Gill Sans - the preferred font of Keynote temoplates) that contain central European characters (čćđšž)? The characters are normally part of ISO8859-2 and standard UTF8 sets, and OS X comes with TONS of fonts that just do not contaun these (this is UTF-8 support? not really). I live in Norway and have a Macbook with International English OS and keyboard, and I need to write and prepare presentations in Croatian. I never had this problem with Windows XP and its standard fonts.

Thanks,

Axi

Macbook (white, 1st gen), Mac OS X (10.4.10)

Posted on Sep 10, 2007 10:56 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 10, 2007 1:06 PM in response to Axial

One thing you can do is the following. Go to Sys Prefs > International > Input Menu and make sure that, for instance, U.S. Extended is turned on. This will enable access to the accents available for those characters. Turn the input menu on, and you can select the U.S. Extended and then "Show Keyboard Viewer." Upon pressing 'alt' you should see the special characters.

For instance, you can type:

'alt + v' and then 'c' to create: č.

Hope this is helpful. Of course many of these characters will be available using other input methods, which you can select via International pane.

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Answer 2

Axial Author

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Sep 10, 2007 1:17 PM in response to sirshane13

That is not the problem. I can type the characters in question (I have the bluetooth keyboard with Croatian layout, and I know how to type them even with the International English keyboard). The problem is that Gill Sans and many other fonts just do not contain those characters, so characters from some other font are shown instead (looks like Times, and you can imagine how pretty a Gill Sans text sprinkled with Times characters looks). I am wondering if there is a version of Gill Sans (and other fonts) that contains those characters - I mean, since Apple has chosen that font for some of its most elegant Keynote templates, it should have made sure that they can be used throughout Europe!

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Answer 3

Sep 10, 2007 1:20 PM in response to Axial

Hm, my Gill Sans types them just fine. So you are saying that when you go into even the character viewer, none of these are available?

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Answer 4

Axial Author

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Sep 10, 2007 1:27 PM in response to sirshane13

Mine doesn't. It contains š and ž, but not č, ć and đ. I am not aware od a language that uses the former, and not the latter.

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

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Sep 10, 2007 2:04 PM in response to Axial

Unfortunately not all fonts have all the Latin characters. In particular some have only the accented characters used in W. European languages. On my machine, if I check č 010D in the Character Palette, Font Variation pane, there nearly 80 choices. But not Gill Sans. However I think Gill Sans Pro by Adobe will have everything, and there may be others too. If there is one included with the MS Office trial, you should check that, as sometimes its fonts have more

I imagine Apple probably makes sure that Gill Sans works in the Latin-using languages for which the app is localized, and that is still relatively few for iWork (iLife at least includes Polish).

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Answer 6

Axial Author

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Sep 17, 2007 2:46 AM in response to Axial

The answer is probably correct, but the truth is deeply unsatisfactory...

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

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Sep 17, 2007 4:54 AM in response to Axial

You may want to ask Apple to include a more complete copy of the fonts you are particularly interested in via the feedback channel:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/feedback/

And of course Leopard, which is coming out soon, may have improvements in this area.

But since there are already a large number of fonts in OS X that can be used for Croatian, I would suspect Apple would put priority on expanding choice for some major languages where only one font is now provided, like Arabic and Hindi.

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Answer 8

Tom Gewecke

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122,240 points

Sep 17, 2007 5:24 AM in response to Axial

For what it's worth, I also count the following significant languages for which no font at all is yet provided in OS X: Sinhala, Myanmar, Ethiopic, Khmer, Bengali, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayam, Lao, Georgian, Tibetan. Hopefully this list will be shortened in Leopard.

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Answer 9

Nov 25, 2007 3:57 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

For Telugu, the font provided by Nick Shanks works fine (I wish Apple supported it directly!). Are you aware of a Telugu-qwerty input for Mac like the one supplied by Apple for Devanagari (Devanagari-QWERTY)? There are several web based applications for the transliteration of Telugu qwerty input (RTS scheme, for example: http://lekhini.org/) to Telugu script. I wish there is a simple way to adopt such a transliteration scheme to Mac OS. Is it that difficult to create one? I've noticed that a lady created something in perl (http://search.cpan.org/~syamal/Unicode-Indic-0.01/lib/Unicode/Indic/Telugu.pm). Is this something that can be adopted for Mac? Despite being a novice on these topics, I don't mind doing the leg work to make a Telugu-QWERTY for Mac, if it can be done. Any help and/or guidance would be appreciated.

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Answer 10

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,240 points

Nov 25, 2007 5:07 PM in response to Krishnarao Maddipati

I don't mind doing the leg work to make a Telugu-QWERTY for Mac, if it can be done. Any help and/or guidance would be appreciated.

This tool might do the trick:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?siteid=nrsi&itemid=ukelele

By the way, Leopard did shorten the list in my earlier message by two: Georgian and Tibetan are now supported via fonts, and Tibetan via keyboards as well.

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