Pages (and iOS/iPadOS) handling of a Unicode Greek character...

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Level 1

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Pages (and iOS/iPadOS) handling of a Unicode Greek character...

A Unicode character for a Greek letter (the obsolete ligature stigma symbol "ϛ", U+03DB "Greek small letter stigma") displays fine on my MacBook (OSX 10.10.5; Pages 5.5.2) but both on iPhone (iOS 15.7.3; Pages 13.0) and iPad (iPadOS 16.3.1; Pages 12.2.1), it renders with extra space before and after the character, so it's essentially useless in reproducing written words. It has the same issue in other apps (eg. Simplenote 4.48 on iOS), and in the system itself, when used as part of a filename, for example.

This is unexpected insofar as I thought Unicode characters would all be handled as standard letters independently of version of app or OS - but apparently not so? Is there a fix, or a workaround that might help? Not to be petty, but tricky typography issues were once the pride and joy of Apple, so I'm hoping it's just my relative incompetence that's the problem here...

Posted on Apr 1, 2023 1:04 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

123,060 points

Apr 1, 2023 5:39 AM in response to progosk

I have not had time to test locally but this sounds like it could be a font issue, where perhaps the default font is missing the character and a double width one is substituting. Could you verify the font being used for it on you iOS apps? ϛιγμα

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

123,060 points

Apr 1, 2023 7:55 AM in response to progosk

progosk wrote:

Is it possible all these pretty common fonts just have not implemented this Unicode character?

Yes. You can check this by opening Character Viewer on your Mac and selecting this character and going to the Font Variation panel at the bottom right (picture below).

Also the issue remains with the letter ϛ used in the filename, so in File there's that extra space, and even in the document name line that Pages shows for the document itself. Is there a way to set the system font differently?

I don't think there is any way to directly change the font used in file and document names. You might look at your settings > general > language and region > preferred languages. If Chinese or Japanese are on the list, remove them. If Greek is not on the list, add it near the top.

To bring the problem to Apple's attention, you can use

Product Feedback - Apple

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Answer 3

progosk Author

Level 1

4 points

Apr 1, 2023 6:47 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks for your feedback: I just checked the default font it was in in the Pages document, and that was simple "Helvetica"; switching fonts, as you suggested, with some others (like Arial, Baskerville, Bodoni, Charter, Cochin, Copperplate, Courier New, Didot, Georgia, Hoefler Text, Palatino, Rockwell, Savoye, Times New Roman) the extra space issue disappears, while with some others (Apple Symbols, Avenir, Damascus, DIN Alternate, Futura, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Optima, Papyrus, Symbol, Trebuchet, Verdana) it persists. Is it possible all these pretty common fonts just have not implemented this Unicode character?

Also the issue remains with the letter ϛ used in the filename, so in File there's that extra space, and even in the document name line that Pages shows for the document itself. Is there a way to set the system font differently? (Still weird this would be a systemic font issue...). Thanks for your thoughts on this.

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Pages (and iOS/iPadOS) handling of a Unicode Greek character...

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