font substitution

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matthias
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font substitution

Post by matthias »

I ran into a problem with Mellel's font substitution. I am using the font Times New Roman for my papers. However, the font I have seems not to have "special characters". E.g. I need the letter "?", which is not part of the Times New Roman font I have. So Mellel replaces the font in order to display the letter "?". But this is not very good, because Mellel uses some non-serifs font as replacement.
So there are two remedies (the third one, which is buying a Times New Roman font that includes more characters, being excluded):
1. I could replace the fonts of letter "?" manually and use Times which has the character I need. But in order to do this using the find and replace command I need to know which font Mellel is using as a default when substituting missing characters in another font. But when I select the letter the pop-up menu in the character palette will still show "Times New Roman". So I don't know which font is used. Is there a way to find out?
2. A more elegant solution would anyway be to tell Mellel which fonts to use when it is faced with a character that is not included in the main font. I couldn't find any hint to such preferences in the guide. Is it possible to make a particular fonts the default fonts replacement?

Thanks,
Matthias
Tom Gewecke
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Re: font substitution

Post by Tom Gewecke »

What special characters are you actually talking about? Surely it is not "?". Someone might have a suggestion about how to get a Times New Roman that has it for free.
nicka
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Post by nicka »

In reverse order, the answers to the questions are:

2. There's no preference setting for which font is used as a replacement.

1. To find out what font Mellel has substituted, copy and paste the text into TextEdit, select the character(s) in question and look at the font in the Font palette (command-t summons it).

Generally the font used is Lucida Grande, in my experience.

Sadly this knowledge will not help much since you can't find characters with substituted fonts in Mellel by searching for the substitute font. Instead, these characters count, as far as Find is concerned, as having the font that the underlying character style would give them -- Times New Roman in your example.
So, as far as I know, the only way to change characters in a substitute font to another font is to go through the document -- with highlighting of substituted characters on -- spotting them and changing them one by one.
(Highlighting characters with font substitutions is turned on in Preferences>Typography)

I hope I'm wrong about this, but I don't think so.
matthias
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Re: font substitution

Post by matthias »

Tom Gewecke wrote:What special characters are you actually talking about? Surely it is not "?". Someone might have a suggestion about how to get a Times New Roman that has it for free.
No, it is not "?". But the one I use apparently can't be displayed by the forum's text engine. It is the an "L" with a "strikethrough" from the Polish alphabet (Unicode 0141).

Matthias
Mart°n
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Re: font substitution

Post by Mart°n »

matthias wrote:
Tom Gewecke wrote:What special characters are you actually talking about? Surely it is not "?". Someone might have a suggestion about how to get a Times New Roman that has it for free.
No, it is not "?". But the one I use apparently can't be displayed by the forum's text engine. It is the an "L" with a "strikethrough" from the Polish alphabet (Unicode 0141).

Matthias
How about using the Times font (without the New Roman). It has the “Ł” character built in. For me (on 10.4 and FireFox) it also works inside the forum software.
You could also set up the Times font as a secondary font, so Mellel will use all characters from the primary font (Times New Roman) and the one that aren’t available in TNR, were taken from the secondary font (Times). Only if the glyphs aren’t available in the first or secondary font, it will use Lucida Grande as a “fallback solution”, because Lucida is the font with the most complete character set.
As Times and Times New Roman look very similar, I think you could replace Times New Roman entirely by Times.
If you have a Windows XP machine available, you could also try to use the Times New Roman delivered with that OS. I’ve heard that it’s a OpenType font with much more characters included than the OS X TNR.
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Post by zoul »

Just in case you care: The “Times” font shipped with OS X is a TrueType font and Mellel currently does not kern TrueType fonts (try the word “VILTAVA” with a high zoom level for example). Therefore it might be a better idea to use the Times as a fallback solution only.
Tom Gewecke
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Re: font substitution

Post by Tom Gewecke »

matthias wrote: But the one I use apparently can't be displayed by the forum's text engine. It is the an "L" with a "strikethrough" from the Polish alphabet (Unicode 0141).
Because these forums are in the Latin-1 charset, you have to use html escape codes to express anything beyond that, and that requires using FireFox instead of Safari. Shouldn't the forums be in UTF-8 instead?

If you install the free trial version of Office2004, I think you will get a Times New Roman with all the characters you need.
matthias
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Re: font substitution

Post by matthias »

Tom Gewecke wrote:
matthias wrote:

If you install the free trial version of Office2004, I think you will get a Times New Roman with all the characters you need.
I even have the education-version of Office 2004. So I'll check the installation CD.

Thanks,
Matthias
Mart°n
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Post by Mart°n »

zoul wrote:Just in case you care: The “Times” font shipped with OS X is a TrueType font and Mellel currently does not kern TrueType fonts (try the word “VILTAVA” with a high zoom level for example). Therefore it might be a better idea to use the Times as a fallback solution only.
That’s true and I even checked this before writing my post, but the Times New Roman on my system (shipped with Tiger) also is a TrueType font, so if one has used Times New Roman before, he shouldn’t notice any difference when switching to Times (assumed that he uses the standard TrueType versions of both fonts)
matthias
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Post by matthias »

Thanks to all of you. Just wanted to let you know that for the time being I settled with Martin's suggestion and will use Times as secondary font. That works just fine for me. However I will check my Windows machine in the office in Monday to see whether the TNR font there is indeed open type.

And I also turned on highlighting of font substitutions, just in case…

Matthias
Tom Gewecke
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Post by Tom Gewecke »

matthias wrote:Thanks to all of you. Just wanted to let you know that for the time being I settled with Martin's suggestion and will use Times as secondary font.
I'm curious -- Did the Times New Roman from Office2004 free trial (v. 3.05) not have the characters you needed? Mine does, will be happy to send you a copy if you want. It is TrueType.
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Post by transalpin »

I settled with Martin's suggestion and will use Times as secondary font.
matthias,

if you use Times for the Latin script and Times New Roman as main font, every “Latin-only” character will be set in Times, and everything else will use TNR. Typically, these will be numbers and punctuation marks. (See for yourself by changing the secondary font’s size.)

The purpose of the secondary font is to substitute characters which don’t belong to the main font’s script.

Use Times as the main font, or even some free OTF font that doesn’t look too fancy (eg, Minion), your professor won’t notice the difference.
matthias
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Post by matthias »

Tom Gewecke wrote: I'm curious -- Did the Times New Roman from Office2004 free trial (v. 3.05) not have the characters you needed? Mine does, will be happy to send you a copy if you want. It is TrueType.
Ugh, I knew there was something I wanted to check. Now I have done that: You were absolutely right. In the fonts folder of the the Office 2004 folder on my hard-disk I found a TRN TrueType font that includes all the characters I need. Thanks for offering to send it to me, though!
transalpin wrote: if you use Times for the Latin script and Times New Roman as main font, every “Latin-only” character will be set in Times, and everything else will use TNR. Typically, these will be numbers and punctuation marks. (See for yourself by changing the secondary font’s size.)

The purpose of the secondary font is to substitute characters which don’t belong to the main font’s script.

Use Times as the main font, or even some free OTF font that doesn’t look too fancy (eg, Minion), your professor won’t notice the difference.
I didn't know that. But now that I have a TRN font that includes all the characters I need, I won't have to use a secondary font, anyway. But the argument made here that Mellel is currently not kerning any TrueType font actually made me think about an alternative for the final print out. I will thus definitely try Minion. I already had a brief look at it, and I am quite impressed with the range of characters offered by this font.

Again thanks to all of you!

Matthias
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