Letter l with stroke through it

Question

Letter l with stroke through it

Letter l with stroke through it

Working in Pages '08, when I type a lower-case l, followed immediately by a slash /, I get this: ł. For example, "matching aural/visual environments" gets rendered as “matching aurałvisual environments.” This happens when I'm using Palatino, my preferred typeface. It doesn't seem to happen with Arial, and I haven't tested it with any other typefaces.

In the Macintosh Character Palette, ł is identified as "Latin small letter l with stroke. Unicode: 0142. UTF8: C5 82."

I don't know whether this is a glitch unique to Palatino or a flaw in Pages. Either way, I'd like to find a solution. Does anyone have any suggestions?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8), Pages '08

Posted on Aug 7, 2010 5:21 PM

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Answer 1

fruhulda

Level 6

15,167 points

Aug 7, 2010 10:54 PM in response to Michael Haldeman

Interesting problem. Is it only with Palatino or have you tried other fonts too?
Does it do this in TextEdit too?
Which Keyboard du you have, US keyboard? I have Swedish and can't reproduce your problem.
You don't have added this behavior in Auto correction?

Work around could be to add a space between the to characters.

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,164 points

Aug 8, 2010 3:05 AM in response to Michael Haldeman

I don't know whether this is a glitch unique to Palatino or a flaw in Pages. Either way, I'd like to find a solution. Does anyone have any suggestions?

This is normally caused when you have an ancient version of Palatino and certain other fonts from OS 9 on your machine. Use fontbook to check for duplicate fonts and if you have more than one Palatino, get rid of the one which is not the latest -- which I think is 3.8 from 2006.

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Answer 3

Aug 12, 2010 3:24 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thank you, Tom. I'm sorry about the delay in answering. You were right: it was an ancient version, and your advice led to a fix. I appreciate your help.

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Answer 4

Aug 12, 2010 3:27 AM in response to fruhulda

Thank you, Fruhulda, for your help. I'm sorry about the delay in answering. The problem turned out to be an old version of Palatino, as suspected by Tom.

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Answer 5

Aug 16, 2010 12:34 AM in response to Michael Haldeman

Working in Pages '08, when I type a lower-case l, followed immediately by a slash /, I get this: ł.

In 2005, Apple Pages version 1 included Linotype Palatino with Apple TrueType spline glyph shapes and Apple Advanced Typography composition. The AAT composition had been created in an Apple tool available in the font software section of the Apple developer site.

The composition is not programmed correctly for ISO-IEC 10646-Universal Character Set compliance. In correct programming, LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE is composed per the graphic in the standard, and a stylistic alternate is composed in the AAT MORX table (or OT GSUB table).

That is, Apple Advanced Typography and Microsoft OpenType make a distinction between preffered letter forms which are composed in the CMAP Character Map table and presentation letter forms which are composed in the AAT MORX or OT GSUB tables.

The graphic in ISO-IEC 10646 is not a glyph variant of LATIN SMALL LETTER L followed by SOLIDUS. If you are writing Polish, the programming is utter non-sense. The same programming has LATIN SMALL LETTER O followed by SOLIDUS as ø, which is bunkum if you are writing Danish or Norwegian.

Apple's idea was to supply mnemonic support for keyboarding non-English writing systems in the Latin script, so as in US English you say of ø that it is a composite of o and slash, you keyboard ø as a composite of o and slash. Arghhhhh ...

/hh

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