Inserting a character when using a word of another laguage...

[JackAnthony]

Version: 2008 Processor: Intel With this version I have discovered that when you click Insert then Symbol not all of the same characters come up as before, in fact I have spent the better part of today searching through the Insert Symbol window and can not find usable characters for what I need. Why are there some missing? There doesn't seem to be as many as before?

 

[CyberTaz]

Well, I don't know what your basis of comparison is, Jack ‹ "as many as
before" isn't very specific However, I'm comparing the Insert> Symbol
dialogs in 2004 & 2008 side by side & the content appears identical to me...
224 glyphs in an 8x28 grid (normal text).

If anything there are more characters available due to the inclusion of
Unicode fonts. You need to select those fonts from the drop down font menu
to access them, though. Not knowing what "usable characters" you're looking
for I can't suggest anything more than that you shop around.

My understanding is that the feature itself remained unchanged because of
the sophistication of the OS X Character Viewer. If not familiar with it you
might want to look it up in Mac Help.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[JackAnthony]

I'm looking for a few latin characters. There are some vowels that have editions (the two dot above for example) and I can get to those, although the ones I'm specifically looking for is on there it is unusable for writing because the spaces between letters are huge so you can not form a sentence! I need the vowels with the small straight line above, a horizontal line not the small flicks. All I appear to have on mine are shapes and Cyrillic characters from Russia, Asia and Greece! It's probably ridiculously simple but I'm ashamed to admit it's the only thing I prefer my PC laptop for! Still, Mac all the way if I can fix this. My dictionary is pretty basic too, can I get updates for dictionaries and characters? Probably not.
Thanks though!
Jack

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Jack:

When you use Insert>Symbol, Word constrains the selection of characters to
those available in fonts marked as being "Symbol Fonts".

You can override this by specifying the font in the Symbol dialog.

Not all fonts are equal: the modern Unicode fonts have a much wider range of
characters available than the older ones.

For example, the Symbol font has about 256 characters available. The new
Calibri Times New Roman fonts have about 1,500.

But since you have a PC Laptop, hunt around in its Fonts folder for a font
named Arial Unicode MS. It's not a "pretty" font, but it has 32,000
characters in it,

Copy it, and drop it into your Mac Font folder. Problem solved: every
character in the known universe is in that font

Now you have all those characters, "finding" the ones you want becomes a
real chore: look in the Apple Help for a thing called the "Character
Viewer". It's up on the menu bar: reveal it and use it to find your
characters.

There's another nifty little applet up there named "Keyboard Viewer" which
will show you where the characters on the keyboard are as you press the
modifier keys such as Option.

Hint: When you click "Insert" in the Character Viewer, Word will sometimes
splutter and protest that it cannot switch to the required font. It's a
bug: Insert the character into TextEdit, then copy it and paste it into
Word.

When you get it into Word, save it as an AutoText or AutoCorrect, so you
don't have to find it again (look those up in the Word help).

Cheers

I'm looking for a few latin characters. There are some vowels that have
editions (the two dot above for example) and I can get to those, although the
ones I'm specifically looking for is on there it is unusable for writing
because the spaces between letters are huge so you can not form a sentence! I
need the vowels with the small straight line above, a horizontal line not the
small flicks. All I appear to have on mine are shapes and Cyrillic characters
from Russia, Asia and Greece! It's probably ridiculously simple but I'm
ashamed to admit it's the only thing I prefer my PC laptop for! Still, Mac all
the way if I can fix this. My dictionary is pretty basic too, can I get
updates for dictionaries and characters? Probably not.
Thanks though!
Jack

--

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matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]