On both new and existing projects - ones that previously worked under 10.4.10/11 - text in Zapf Dingbats switches to Lucida Grande. I can apply Zapf Dingbats to a new track, and it takes effect in the Inspector, but as soon as I type a letter it switches to Lucida. This happens for both the "Zapf Dingbats" and the "ITC Zapf Dingbats" entries.
This does not happen for other glyph/dingbat fonts like Wingdings.
Thanks!
Matt
MacBook Pro,
Mac OS X (10.5.1),
FCE 3.5.1 - Livetype 2.1
OK - after a couple of hours of reinstalling, Archive and Installing, and generally trying just about everything, I figured it out. Here's what happened:
Apparently in Leopard (os 10.5) fonts with Special Characters (alternate language glyphs like Arabic, "Dingbats" and other symbols, etc) have those Special Characters stored in the correct Unicode group of the font, and NOT in the regular / Latin area. So previously, where I was used to pressing "b" in Zapf Dingbats and getting a certain compass symbol, that symbol is now located elsewhere in the font, and can only be located using the Character Palette.
Note that this is not consistent across applications: TypePad behaves like this, LiveType does, but Microsoft Word doesn't. I'm guessing it has something to do with the quality and consistency of Unicode support. Not only that, but LiveType doesn't let the Character Palette change the current font correctly, so getting just the right symbol into the track can be challenging.
This is
incredibly confusing, and
incredibly poorly documented. Google searches for lost fonts, lost characters, etc turned up nothing, and Apple's own documentation was woefully incomplete in this area. I know this is the "correct" way to do it, but a little heads-up that such consistent workflows, used for years, would change would have been a nice thing to know.
Hopefully this note will help others in a similar situation.
This issue with symbol fonts is not just in Leopard, its in Tiger and may go all the way back to 10.0. You can't really have an "a" in Zapf Dingbats appear as a flower, it just seems that way in MS Word and other apps that do magic behind the scenes to turn what you think is the good old Classic (OS 6,7,8,9) way into modern Unicode.
What really confused
me about this was that for some fonts (Webdings, for example), the special characters still show up in the keyboard viewer. And, when you try to switch one of these symbol fonts in the standard OS X Font palette (in TextEdit or Create, but not Mail), the font name displayed in the palette switches to what I thought was the wrong font: Lucida Grande or sometimes Monaco. And you get an "a" or a "4" or whatever instead of a flower or triangle. It turns out, under Unicode, some (all?) symbol fonts borrow from more standard fonts to show you standard letters and numbers.
Looks like the old way of picking a symbol font, and typing a key, is dead. As Matt said, get thee to the Character Palette (enabled in System Preferences >International > Input Menu).
There's a good writeup of what's going on (including the special situation of Adobe CS apps) in the ebook *Take Control of Fonts in Leopard* under *The Zapf Dingbats and Symbol Nightmare*. Nightmare is right.
I have converted my ITC Zapf ps version to a True Type using Font Exchange and it now views, also tried an open type conversion but this acted the same as the ps
