Font - Symbol

What is interesting to me is that I have Pages v10.3.9 and macOS 11.2.2 on both M1 mini and Intel platforms, and I cannot see Apple Symbol, or Symbol in the Pages Font menu.

The fonts are present and verify in Font Book, and are readily seen in LibreOffice Writer v7.1, or Mellel v5.0.6 — where I can type an 'a' and get 'α' using the Symbol font.

I am sending a bug report to the Pages Product team over this.

jee1949 wrote:

I have just downloaded Pages from the App store. I need to use the symbol font for Greek letters in my teaching notes. When I select symbol font and type "a", I should get the alpha symbol but the usual "a" appears. I checked the font setting and the display shows all the Greek letters.

I recommend you not use the Symbol font to type Greek. Everyone moved away from this method to Unicode many years ago, so that there is no need for others reading your text to have some special font installed to get alpha instead of a. To input Greek is is best to use the the Greek keyboard or the Character Viewer.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/type-language-mac-input-sources-mchlp1406/11.0/mac/11.0

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-emoji-and-symbols-on-mac-mchlp1560/11.0/mac/11.0

(Or an equation editor if you a typing a lot of those)

VikingOSX wrote:

I am sending a bug report to the Pages Product team over this.

I think Apple has done this on purpose as part of its effort to make things fully Unicode compliant. 3rd party apps do not care that much.

The blahtex translator guide does not offer \omicron, though some LaTeX packages offer variations of it. Whether this is due to the similarity (and confusion) between omicron and the lower-case character "o", I guess we won't know the reasoning.

I used the character viewer's entry (U+03BF) for lower-case omicron and double-clicked it to insert it into the \newcommand definition. The default math roman font (e.g. \mathrm} that blahtex uses may be an appearance abomination, and without LaTeX package fontspec support, I cannot tell it to use any installed System font instead.

VikingOSX wrote:

BTW, the Apple Pages product team has reached out to me about these Apple Symbol and Symbol fonts not appearing font menus for Pages, Numbers, Keynote {v10.3.9} — or (TextEdit, Mail).

On my Catalina I did now find those two fonts in Pages' and TextEdit's font lists. They both seem to produce Unicode, however, and only output Latin from the US keyboard layout.

They are definitely missing in Big Sur 11.2.2 here on both Intel and M1 with Pages v10.3.9. Just checked again in case I was having a blind-as-a-bat episode, and nope, they are still missing. Can see my ITC Zapf Dingbats Type 1, but not Apple Symbol or Symbol. 🤓

Symbol does create Greek in LibreOffice for me. If you copy/paste to Pages or TextEdit the result is Unicode, changing the font keeps the Greek. But inside LibreOffice, it's not Unicode, if you change the font it becomes Latin. Weird!

Update. Just received an email from the Pages product team, and for Pages v10.3.9, one must add either the Arabic or Hebrew language to System Preferences > Language & Region Preferred Language list. Continue to use your default language, do not replace it with these, and they will simply be added to the list.

Once you have performed the first paragraph, launch Pages, and you will find Apple Symbols and Symbols font menu items. One can see the respective symbology in Apple's Font Book for each font, select it, and copy/paste into Pages.

VikingOSX wrote: Update. Just received an email from the Pages product team, and for Pages v10.3.9, one must add either the Arabic or Hebrew language to System Preferences > Language & Region Preferred Language list.

Interesting! I guess that is why they were on my font lists, because I always have those languages on the language list.

Are the latex and mathml options of any use for your purposes?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207569

Entering the greek LaTeX commands in the Pages Equation editor, and defining \omicron as it does not otherwise exist.

Here is a different treatment and (to me) omicron looks somewhat improved:

Makes sense. Not a big deal for me.