Zapf Dingbats

[xgipper]

Hi
Any idea why PL won't let me use change characters into the font Zapf Dingbats, despite the typeface seemingly being available in font lists in both tool settings and the tool box, and when I use command T? But when I copy and paste a Zapf Dingbatted character from Word, it finds that acceptable.
Odd.

[Martin Huber]

Any idea why PL won't let me use change characters into the font Zapf Dingbats, despite the typeface seemingly being available in font lists in both tool settings and the tool box, and when I use command T? But when I copy and paste a Zapf Dingbatted character from Word, it finds that acceptable.

If a font doesn't support a character, PhotoLine will use and set a replacement font, that supports this character.

Martin

[xgipper]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. To be honest I still don't understand the issue, but at least copying and pasting from Word seems to work for the odd character/symbol.

[Martin Huber]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. To be honest I still don't understand the issue, but at least copying and pasting from Word seems to work for the odd character/symbol.

Mac OS no longer allows entering symbol characters by keyboard. Instead the preferred way is to use the Character Viewer (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1518).

Martin

[bkh]

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. To be honest I still don't understand the issue, but at least copying and pasting from Word seems to work for the odd character/symbol.

Mac OS no longer allows entering symbol characters by keyboard. Instead the preferred way is to use the Character Viewer (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1518).

If xgipper is still on Mac OS 10.5.8 (as his signature says) there'll be no Character Viewer – the HT article says:

"Mac OS X v10.4 and 10.5: Use the Help menu to search for "Typing special characters or symbols".

For OX X 10.8, you can simply use "Edit -> Special Characters …" in PL to access the Character viewer. Double-click the character you want to insert it into a text layer. Earlier versions of OS X had an insert button.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[xgipper]

He is, at this time, still attempting to continue to use a G5 Powermac and 10.5.8. Using PL, apart from this issue, seems just fine. TenFourFox makes browsing just about tolerable. (Life would probably be easier using XP as that seems, for the moment at least, better supported - but that discussion is w-ay off topic ).

[bkh]

He is, at this time, still attempting to continue to use a G5 Powermac and 10.5.8. Using PL, apart from this issue, seems just fine.

I don't remember Mac OS 10.5 very well – it came with one of my Macs, I think, but I went straight from 10.4 to 10.6 because it was a free upgrade, and I think I only started using PL when I was already using 10.6. Anyhow, I had a quick look and came across http://symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu/keyboard ... alosx.html. So it seems that you should be able to access the Character Palette from the Edit Menu -> Special Characters … or, if that doesn't work, you should be able to activate the Character Palette from the Keyboard Menu (as described in the above link).

Cheers

Burkhard.

[xgipper]

Thanks, yes I can access 'Special Characters' from PL's Edit menu. Just experimenting with that now. Can't quite see how/whether you can view characters from a specific font, but nonetheless looks useful and it does insert the chosen character into PL.

[greenmorpher]

This is crazy stuff! I am on X.6.8 and I never noticed this.

Zapf Dingbats works fine my general graphics/DTP program, Canvas X -- now a legacy program but I use it frequently.

Zapf Dingbats works fine in Sandvox 2.8.4 -- a very up to the minute, Apple approved program which I use frequently.

Zapf Dingbts does not work in NisusWriter Pro 2.0.4 -- up to the minute, Apple approved. "Some characters, etc., etc.," rubbish!!!

Zapf Dingbats does not work in PhotoLine 17.53 -- up to the minute, etc.

Wingdings and Webdings show the same behavior.

ANOTHER (old) Dingbats font works in them all!

What garbage is this that Apple is dumping on us? And what next?

Cheers, geoff

[greenmorpher]

SOLUTION!!! Get ITC Zapf Dingbats -- it works in everything. It's a TrueType font.

Cheers, geoff

[bkh]

Zapf Dingbats does not work in PhotoLine 17.53 -- up to the minute, etc.

Strange. Works here (OS X 10.8.5 and OS X 10.6..

What I'm missing in OS X is to be able to pick a character from a given font (say, Zapf Dingbats). Font Book lets you view those characters, but you can't copy and paste them. In Character Viewer, you choose the character first and then pick one of the fonts which contain it. The only alternative I'm aware of is PopCharX (there is a free trial version).

I guess that the ITC Zapf Dingbats font is an old (non-unicode) font which maps Dingbats to ordinary characters? I guess if you get a recent version, it will also be Unicode.

Cheers

Burkhard.

[Cantello]

Similar problem: I'd like to add symbols from Apple's Emoji font to some text. However, neither by changing the font to "Apple Color Emoji" nor by entering the characters directly via the edit menu/special characters, the emojis are added to the selected text in photoline.

Any ideas what I could do?

Addendum: If I simply drag an emoji from Apple's character viewer into a PL document, I get an error message ("Severe error. Save your document and close the application" or something to that effect) that can only be resolved by quickly closing the error message and deleting the character that was just dragged to the document.

[Martin Huber]

Similar problem: I'd like to add symbols from Apple's Emoji font to some text.

In fact, that is a completely different problem

However, neither by changing the font to "Apple Color Emoji" nor by entering the characters directly via the edit menu/special characters, the emojis are added to the selected text in photoline.

There are several problems:
- The OS function, that is currently used by PhotoLine, isn't able to display Apple Color Emoji. It just shows nothing.
- There is no standard for colored fonts and Apple's way of colored fonts is undocumented, so exporting that to PDF will be a problem.
- Currently PhotoLine lacks support of the full Unicode range (characters higher than 0xffff).

Addendum: If I simply drag an emoji from Apple's character viewer into a PL document, I get an error message ("Severe error. Save your document and close the application" or something to that effect) that can only be resolved by quickly closing the error message and deleting the character that was just dragged to the document.

I will fix that.

Martin

[Cantello]

In fact, that is a completely different problem

Ok, for me it just seemed similar...

There are several problems:
- The OS function, that is currently used by PhotoLine, isn't able to display Apple Color Emoji. It just shows nothing.
- There is no standard for colored fonts and Apple's way of colored fonts is undocumented, so exporting that to PDF will be a problem.
- Currently PhotoLine lacks support of the full Unicode range (characters higher than 0xffff).

After finding out that the glyphs in Apple's Emoji font are just PNGs anyway, I simply added images of the Emojis that I wanted (http://emojipedia.org/) and was happy with the results. I just checked and could only find two fonts with characters higher than FFFF (Segoe UI Symbols & Apple Emoji) so this won't be much of a limitation.