Fonts

Is there something simple I"m missing here ?

In modern Unicode apps you normally don't get symbols by just switching fonts. You need to use the Character Palette to input them (Edit > Special Characters).

not what I am looking for.

What exactly are you looking for? In Character Palette, have you set View = All Characters, By Category, Symbols?

is it just the fact that I'm using Pages, and the apple symbols font will not work???

No, the font works perfectly in Pages. To use it specifically, in Character Palette set View = Glyph, Font = Apple Symbols

I'm having more or less the same problem and it's maddening. All I want to do is format text in the Zapf Dingbat typeface. I want to type the letter I want, choose Zapf Dingbats from the font pop-up in the tool bar and have it format as a dingbat character. Instead I have to go through this clunky, inconvenient Characters panel and search around for the dingbat I want. Every time.

I don't understand why I have to that. Why can't I just format text the way I can with every other font? It's very frustrating. And why does Webdings work but not Zapf Dingbats?

You are not missing anything, it's just that the options are no longer available.
Best to use the favourite list in Character Viewer > Gear drop down bottom left.

Special Symbols available by changing the Font at this stage (I'm using SnowLeopard):

Bodoni Ornaments. Yes
Type Embellishments One LET. Yes
Webdings and Wingdings Yes in Pages ~ No in TextEdit or Bean.

Symbol. No
Apple Symbol. No
Zapt Dingbats. No

Feedback to Apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
S.

Special Symbols available by changing the Font at this stage (I'm using SnowLeopard):

Bodoni Ornaments. Yes
Type Embellishments One LET. Yes
Webdings and Wingdings Yes in Pages

Complying with Unicode standards means that hitting the "a" key with the US keyboard layout active should always produce an "a", regardless of the font. Fonts and features that still do otherwise are essentially holdovers from 1990's technology and I would expect Apple to phase them out totally in the future. Normally all symbols should be at codepoints other than those used by normal Latin characters and be accessed by a character palette or custom keyboard layout.

I am well aware of the new standards:

Bodoni Ornaments and Type embellishments fonts are installed by iWork so Apple is using "old fonts" in a 2005 app?

A bit of help and a good sales spiel is needed for people having to use another app, ie Character viewer for something many have been able to do for years without. At this stage Character Viewer is no match against a good font memory.
S.

Ashka wrote:

Bodoni Ornaments and Type embellishments fonts are installed by iWork so Apple is using "old fonts" in a 2005 app?

Yes, Apple shipped "old fonts" with iWork. I still cannot understand that the majority of iWork's fonts lack italic and bold typefaces, considering that iWork has no faux bold or italics support. It seems illogical and a wide open door to user confusion.

(When it comes to symbols and fonts, I have no particularly interesting opinions. There are good arguments both for and against the Character Viewer.)

Hey, it worked! I did this:

Characters palette
View: PI Fonts
(choose the dingbat character)
Click the button Insert with Font

Voilá! You can then type in any dingbat character, which is what I wanted in the first place. It's not nearly as Mac-like as just selecting the character then selecting Zapf Dingbats from the Font menu (Apple: what is going on?!? You did invent the Mac interface, right?), but it gets the job I needed to do done.

But jeeze, there's gotta be a more elegant way to do this. Why change the behavior after 20 years?

Tom, I understand the rationale behind Unicode standards compliance, but ditching techniques that have been around for years is confusing. I know this because I was confused. InDesign, Word, and any number of apps make it easier for the user to deal with symbol fonts like Zapf Dingbats. It just surprises and disappoints me that complying with standards requires a learning curve for the user and, ultimately, requires users to go out of their way to do something that was easier before. I struggled with this for days--I couldn't find anything in the Help about it.

I'm not stupid. So it seems like improving the interface design for this feature would make life a little easier for the average user.There's no good reason to search out and use a clumsy feature.

Sorry about this rant, but I wasted a lot of otherwise billable time trying to figure out what to do.

Message was edited by: Andrew LaGow

So it seems like improving the interface design for this feature would make life a little easier for the average user.

Correct, there is no reason Apple could not provide a keyboard layout for the Dingbat range of Unicode (U+2700 on) conforming to what users normally expect, and probably the same for some other symbol fonts. It would not take much work to do so with the keyboard creator Ukelele.

I'm not stupid

No-one is suggesting you are stupid. Let me explain why Apple has a problem explaining in plain words what the problem is and whose political industry position the problem is related to.

Simple set theory says that if you have a heterogenous computing environment with many small corporate coded character sets and small standard coded character sets with incompatible constituencies,

1. Communications capacity cannot be increased by increasing connectivity infrastructure, since you have no common superset of character codes for input and interchange of character information,

2. Communications capacity can be increased by allowing computerised composition to ignore character codes and map into a configurable name space,

3. Communications capacity can then be increased by growing the printing industry, both digital graphic printers for the desktop and digital graphic recorders for imaging printing film.

Speaking before the British Computer Society at the award of the Lady Ada Lovelace prize in 2004, Dr John Warnock explained the above strategy for Adobe PostScript in the Apple LaserWriter.

DTP Desktop Publishing was in particular the product of an agreement between the CEO of Apple, the CEO of Adobe, and the CEO of Linotype entered into in late 1984.

The agreement established the professional practice of overriding the source character string in order to draw a different world script or stylistic alternates of the same world script.

Adobe PostScript version 23 for the first Apple LaserWriter introduced two encoding vectors, StandardEncoding and FontspecificEncoding - also commonly called SymbolEncoding.

The read only memory of the Apple LaserWriter had scalable font masters in the typeface families in two classes:

Alphabeticals: Linotype Times, Linotype Helvetica
Analphabeticals and Greek: Dingbats, Symbol

In other words, in order to draw Greek on the digital graphic device, input of Apple Roman character codes was overridden. After 1990, this was extended to drawing Latin composition.

After the CEO of Apple left to found another company, Apple development designed and developed the foundation format of the character-glyph model agreed by ISO and Unicode.

If Apple publishes the true story of FontSpecific encoding, and the story of why the Symbol font in Apple Mac OS does not work the way the Symbol font does in Apple Mac OS X, then Apple also has to publish the biggest problem in computerised full character cataloguing, that is, the story of the agreement between the three people that today have produced an unmanageable problem with type product that has nothing whatsoever to do with the ISO universal character set.

So, if you want the true story, you send a mail to the CEO of Apple.

/hh

Henrik Holmegaard wrote:

So, if you want the true story, you send a mail to the CEO of Apple.

/hh

Wow. I mean wow. That was very enlightening. I knew some of that story--namely the relationship between Apple and Warnock concerning PostScript--but that was fascinating and very informative.

Incidentally, I wasn't suggesting anyone thought I was stupid. The impetus behind that comment was that computers, through unintuitive user interface design, have a tendency to make people feel stupid, since they can't figure out the poorly-designed interfaces and feel they would be able to if they were smarter. It's the same phenomenon that compels people to do the same thing when something doesn't work the way they expect over and over again expecting different results. It's amazing the behaviors computers inspire (also that only people who use drugs and people who use computers are both called users, but that's another topic altogether). That's a lot to expect readers to pick up on (duh!), so I apologize for not being more clear about that.

Still, it would be nice if the Character palette would disappear. Here's to hoping. And I did send feedback to Apple.

It's the same phenomenon that compels people to do the same thing when something doesn't work the way they expect over and over again expecting different results.

This is true, but after writing the Scandinavian review of TrueType 2 and ColorSync 2 in September 1994 for the professional prepress monthly that is now www.agi.se, and writing commercial user guides and so many non-commercial support posts that I have long lost count, the fundamental fact is that you need a Keynesian economy of knowledge whereby it is universally understood that input of character information is independent of output of imageable composition just as input of colour information is independent of output of imageable colourant. Computerised full character and full colour cataloguing depends on a distinction between the meaning, the mark, and the medium whereas pen and paper or print and paper only have the physical mark on the physical medium. TrueType 2 and ColorSync 2 introduced the idea of maintaining the meaning and morphing the mark, because if in order to draw on a digital graphic device one must morth the meaning then the consequence is either the collapse of computerised full character cataloguing, or the collapse of computerised full colour cataloguing, or the collapse of both.

If one wants to draw "Adobe Offices" with the typographic ligature "ffi", then it is unwise to replace the completely correct character codes LATIN SMALL LETTER F, LATIN SMALL LETTER F and LATIN SMALL LETTER I with an arbitrary character code such as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Y. Meanwhile, if you look up Appendix E of the Adobe PostScript Reference Manual, Second Edition, December 1990, that is precisely what the Adobe Type Library and the allied Linotype Type Library did. This is why Microsoft Corporation still has not introduced advanced typography for Latin line layout in Microsoft Office - it would be necessary to explain to everyday endusers that Adobe and Linotype (Heidelberg after 1996) have produced a problem on such a scale that it makes nonsense of server farms and cloud computing for the conventions of Modern English composition as one could achieve in Monotype metal composition in innumerable titles printed in letterpress at Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.

The CEO of Apple was CEO of NeXT at the time, and NeXT used Adobe Display PostScript that did not support the ISO and Unicode character-glyph model, but supported the Adobe Type 1 font program dictionary model.

/hh

Still, it would be nice if the Character palette would disappear. Here's to hoping.

What do you want in its place? The limited number of keys on a normal keyboard makes it hard to cover everything in Unicode that way, so a palette like that is probably essential.