International keyboard with diacriticals not working

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Level 3

679 points

International keyboard with diacriticals not working

I'm having problems with international keyboard/language settings. I'm trying to work with the Irish language.

I have Everson Typography's "Ceanannas" font. It's a gorgeous old fashioned Irish font. Applications seem to work with it in a quite variable way, however.

I can go into Adobe InDesign CS and, in the InDesign Glyphs palette, I can enter any character I want including the letters with the dots on them, the funky 's' and 'r', the funky ampersand (Tirolian something-or-other), etc.

However, if I follow Everson's directions on using the OS X Irish Extended keyboard definition (where Opt+W and then the consonant will result in the consonant with a dot above it), that only works for 'c' and 'g'; it doesn't work for m, t, d, s, or b. I think it's a problem with InDesign, though, because if I open the OS X graphical keyboard applet, the proper letters (dotted) show up after I enter the Opt+W.

If I use Word, then Word will never put the dots above any consonant. (I read elsewhere on this forum that Word X doesn't understand this; does the latest version of Word work?)

If I use Apple Pages, then 'c' and 'g' work, but any other consonant gets a dot above it but it is displayed in an Arial-like font (which clashes horribly with the beautiful Ceanannas).

Does any app work correctly? Or is this a problem with OS X 10.4.2?

Thanks.

P.S.--the keyboard viewer applet is tiny, and it's hard to see the diacriticals after pressing Opt+W. Can it be enlarged at all?

Posted on Oct 26, 2005 9:36 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Oct 26, 2005 9:46 AM in response to L M

I read elsewhere on this forum that Word X doesn't understand this; does the latest version of Word work?

Yes. Word X doesn't do Unicode. Word 2004 does.

If I use Apple Pages, then 'c' and 'g' work, but any other consonant gets a dot above it but it is displayed in an Arial-like font (which clashes horribly with the beautiful Ceanannas).

This indicates it may be a problem with Ceanannas. In Pages, TextEdit, and other OS X Unicode apps, the font used for such characters is Lucida Grande. If you use this, everything on the keyboard should work fine. Does it?

the keyboard viewer applet is tiny, and it's hard to see the diacriticals after pressing Opt+W. Can it be enlarged at all?

Go to the three buttons at the top left and hit the rightmost one, which will turn green when you are over it.

I think perhaps Ceannas is non-Unicode and not designed for the Unicode Irish keyboard layout. Instead you get the special characters by using the option and option + Shift levels of the normal US layout. You can see the map here:

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/everson/ceanannas/ceanannas/mac-ttf/84396/charmap.h tml?vid=84396&cpselect=CP4

Whether this will work in a particular app you can only tell by trying. Since it's not Unicode, WordX may work OK.

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Answer 2

L M Author

Level 3

679 points

Oct 26, 2005 7:27 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom, thanks for your quick, thorough, and informative reply.

Go to the three buttons at the top left and hit the rightmost one, which will turn green when you are over it.

Duh! Never thought to try that. I tried yanking on the bottom right corner to no avail. Works great. And I can now see that the dotted characters (except for c and g, as I mentioned before) are wrong on the virtual keyboard, too.

So that might lend credence to this not being a Unicode font. However, three things make me think it probably is Unicode:

1. If you look at his bio, he is one of the co-authors of the Unicode standard:
http://www.evertype.com/misc/bio.html

2. His web site for this font shows all the correct dotted characters:
http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/ceanannas.html

3. The only reason I know I can do the Opt+W on the Irish Extended keyboard is because his web site gave instructions:
http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/celt-keys.html which leads to
http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/ga-keys-x.html

If, after all that, his own fonts aren't Unicode, well I guess I'm disappointed. 😟

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Oct 26, 2005 8:02 PM in response to L M

three things make me think it probably is Unicode:

But it's not. It says right on the page where you buy it:

"The Macintosh versions of these fonts are encoded according to the Mac Gaelic Roman character set, which has been the standard character set for Gaelic fonts on the Mac since 1993, when the Irish localization of Mac System 6.0.8 and 7.1 were released."

The Mac could not do Unicode until OS X, and before that came out Everson did tons of non-Unicode stuff, so that OS 9 and earlier could handle various languages. This is one of them.

His web site for this font shows all the correct dotted characters:

It's a graphic, not text.

If you switch to the US layout, can you see all the right stuff in the font? Sometimes keyboard viewer will insist on using Lucida Grande anyway.

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Answer 4

L M Author

Level 3

679 points

Oct 26, 2005 8:37 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Oh, that's too bad. 😟

I was hoping I wouldn't have to remember all those non-mnemonic keyboard "shortcuts". Oh well, now I'm an informed consumer for my next font purchase!

Thanks, Tom.

Lou.

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Oct 26, 2005 8:55 PM in response to L M

I'm still curious though -- in WordX or Pages, if you have the keyboard layout set to US and the font set to Ceanannas, will keyboard viewer show you the right letters? For example, Option + 5 should be B with dot above, Option + m should be C with dot above, Option + p should be F with dot above.

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Answer 6

L M Author

Level 3

679 points

Oct 26, 2005 10:09 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Yep, the letters show up correctly in Keyboard Viewer, and they get inserted correctly everywhere--Word, Pages, InDesign. It is horrifically un-mnemonic (dare I say de-monic!).

Initially, I thought that it didn't give me all the letters, but now that I look closely I see that they are all there.

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Oct 26, 2005 10:26 PM in response to L M

Good news -- thanks for the info. If at some point you want to use Unicode fonts with the Irish Unicode keyboard layout, you can check this page, the section "Free Windows Fonts" (which should also work on OS X):

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/mearchlar/fonts.htm

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Answer 8

L M Author

Level 3

679 points

Oct 26, 2005 10:52 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Great link!

Go raibh maith agat. (Thank you.)

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