How to find out font does not have international support

Question

Level 1

8 points

How to find out font does not have international support

Hi,

OS X claims itself Unicode supporting system - that is true however only a minor portion of native or preinstalled fonts support CE accented characters such as ľĺščťďžýáíéŕňäúô.

The question is: how can I find out which font has international support and which doesn't?

The problem is, that when you use font without CE support, it replaces problematic characters with the closes match (e.g. instead of Geneva you will get Arial for certain CE characters). This is sometimes very hard to spot and you often find this out in prints where every now and then a single character is printed in different font/size or missing altogether. And attempt to print document usually escalates the problem.

Windows supports CE and many other alphabets in its standard English distribution with ALL its core fonts. It is a SHAME that Apple plainly ignores half of the planet for so many years (I understand, however, that half of the planet does not equal half of the market.).

Posted on Jul 30, 2006 8:52 PM

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Answer 1

Király

Level 6

10,025 points

Jul 31, 2006 12:19 AM in response to Skippi

The question is: how can I find out which font has international support and which doesn't?

Go to the Edit menu of any application and select Special Characters, which will open the Character Palette. In the View drop-down at the top, select "Roman". Click on "By Category". On the left hand side, click "Accented Latin". You will get a listing of all available accented characters in the Roman script, including Central European ones. Click on the desired character. At the bottom of the window where it says Collections, select "Containing selected character". The window below will display all the available fonts that have that character.

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Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,514 points

Jul 31, 2006 3:37 AM in response to Skippi

only a minor portion of native or
preinstalled fonts support CE accented characters
such as ľĺščťďžýáíéŕňäúô.

I haven't heard this complaint before in several years following language issues here. Could you name some of the fonts which don't have the support you require? My impression is that Geneva does. If you think it doesn't, could you be specific about the characters?

Do you have multiple copies of some fonts on your machine, some of which might be older and without Unicode support (Type I Postscript) and wind up being used for printing?

Are you perhaps using old pre-Unicode apps like Office X or AppleWorks? If so, then you always need to select fonts with CE at the end of the name and your choices are quite limited. Upgrading to Office2004 would expand them a great deal.

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Answer 3

Skippi Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 31, 2006 1:59 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Just as an example, fonts listed here do not support all of the characters, however, these look pretty Microsoftish. Unfortunatelly, right now I don't have machine with the new iWork ’06 at hand: the problem was, I could not use any of iWork templates because of problem with it's fonts. So I may update this list during my next visit to Apple Store and list here the most troublesome fonts. And yes, my bad, Geneva supports the whole family.

Thanks for your reply!

American Typewriter
Andale Mono
Arial Black
Arial Narrow
Arial Rounded
Baskerville
Big Caslon
Brush Script
Chalkboard
Cochin
Copperplate
Courier New
Georgia
Gill Sans
Herculanum
Impact
...

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Answer 4

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,514 points

Jul 31, 2006 4:08 PM in response to Skippi

Thanks for that useful list. I think the normal OS X fonts that will do CE should be these:

Arial, Century, Chalkboard, Charcoal, Chicago, Courier, Didot, Futura, Geneva, Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Monaco, New York, Sand, Skia, TektonPro, Times, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Zapfino

I think one way to get some more is to install the fonts that come with MS Office 2004 (including the free trial).

Regarding iWork, I assume that if you want you can change the fonts in the templates to one of those that does do CE, right?

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,514 points

Aug 1, 2006 6:24 AM in response to Skippi

Correction: Chalkboard should be removed from the list I provided of fonts that do support CE.

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Answer 6

Skippi Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 1, 2006 11:04 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Well, regarding iWork I would like to use the fonts that are bundled and used for the templates because they are pretty. I don't want to spent hundreds of extra dollars on buying crippled CE versions.

This is where I am pointing: why Apple does not want to make all of its bundled fonts universal? Microsoft does since the game console named Windows 98. They got rid of the always problematic "CE" back then.

What's the point of unicode when you are actually not using its extended array for accented latin? I am impressed with the number of asian scripts the default OS X installation contains. Much better then Windows. But as far as support for CE scripts goes - it is undoubtedly the worst currently developed OS on the planet. Jobs take that!

Now - I cannot use CE fonts. I don't want to use CE. Anything CE that you send over and try to read on a PC arrives mangled. If you want to share anything else than PDF, it must not be CE. And that leaves you with a pretty narrow options, doesn't it?

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Answer 7

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,514 points

Aug 1, 2006 11:54 AM in response to Skippi

Well, regarding iWork I would like to use the fonts
that are bundled and used for the templates because
they are pretty. I don't want to spent hundreds of
extra dollars on buying crippled CE versions.

I think you misunderstood me. One can't even use CE fonts with OS X (except in a couple of obsolete apps) and I would never recommend that anyone acquire or install them. I meant that you could change the default fonts in the templates to other Unicode fonts that do include the Latin Extended-A block needed for CE languages.

I assume you're aware that Apple OS X apps can also use all the MS and Adobe and other Unicode fonts made for Windows that do contain Latin Extended-A, so you are not confined to Apple's fonts?

I grant that it would be better if all the Unicode fonts supplied with OS X, iWork, and iLife included more character ranges, but the current state for CE scripts is at least a whole lot better than for the Arabic or Devanagari scripts, where there is only one font available and Windows fonts usually cannot substitute.

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Answer 8

Skippi Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 1, 2006 7:05 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

I grant that it would be better if all the Unicode
fonts supplied with OS X, iWork, and iLife included
more character ranges, but the current state for CE
scripts is at least a whole lot better than for the
Arabic or Devanagari scripts, where there is only
one font available and Windows fonts usually cannot
substitute.

I got your point and thanks for the insight. The market dictates. Countries east of Germany are not a market for Apple, there's no Apple store and people rely on support from 3rd party vendors who often barely know their business. That leads to low sales and that leads to low demand for CE scripts - and low justification of expenses to make them. Arabic or Devanagari are probably the same case. However, it is a chicken-egg problem and it is Apple who holds the money and the resources to make these scripts happen.

I appreciate your input, Tom.

M.

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Answer 9

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,514 points

Aug 2, 2006 11:27 AM in response to Skippi

However, it is
a chicken-egg problem and it is Apple who holds the
money and the resources to make these scripts happen.

I think it might be useful to put up a list of standard Apple Unicode fonts that do support CE, both to show people what they need to use and to illustrate how many do not. Here is a first draft (there are a lot of fonts I haven't tested yet). Corrections are welcome.

http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/cefonts.html

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Answer 10

Skippi Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 3, 2006 3:24 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks for that useful list. As far as Mac OS X, I find it very accurate. I cannot test iLife/iWork at this moment. That is truly a very small portion of bundled fonts, unfortunately. I don't know what keeps Apple back from investing couple thousand dollars to get this right. Every serious type foundry would render them proper letters - it is not something they could not afford or something that the newly attracted customers would not gladly pay for. If Steve Jobs is fond of typography, it should be his personal interest.

And one more thing. Don't think that the fonts that are listed as the ones that do support CE scripts do it right. A good portion of them uses ridiculously wrong size of accents in letters like ď, ť, ľ, ž and wrong letter-spacing (too big accents, too wide spaces). If interested, see http://diacritics.typo.cz/

So, Mac OS the most advanced OS on the planet? Well, yes, but not for too many people. For others, most advanced but most unusable, too.

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Answer 11

Hen3ry

Level 3

505 points

Sep 27, 2006 9:10 PM in response to Skippi

Folks:

CE fonts like "Times CE" and Cyrillic (?) fonts like "Times CY" consume space in my Office 2004 (fully updated) font menus. I will never use these, especially after reading this thread.

So is there ANY way to get rid of them? I run with minimal fonts, so the CE and CY fonts end up being a considerable proportion of my font list.

Thanks,

Henry

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Answer 12

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,514 points

Sep 28, 2006 3:50 AM in response to Hen3ry

So is there ANY way to get rid of them? I run with
minimal fonts, so the CE and CY fonts end up being a
considerable proportion of my font list.

I don't think so. Most of them are not really separate fonts but just a separate listing for a particular encoding contained in a normal font. You might want to ask in the newsgroups where the MS experts hang out:

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups

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Answer 13

Hen3ry

Level 3

505 points

Sep 28, 2006 11:30 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Tom Gewecke:

Thanks for your response on this thread.

Yes, I've noticed that no "CE" or "CY" appears in any Mac font management tools or in the font folders themselves, so I concluded that fonts with these names are special "views" of normal fonts. Only some apps, MS Office among them, seek out and list these "views".

I wonder if there's a way to trim a normal font to get rid of the CE or CY segment. That may be the simplest way to resolve this issue, sad to say.

I have posted about this on microsoft.public.mac.office.word about every year or so. I'll do it again...

Thanks,

Henry

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