Inserting fractions in Times

[Barbara Barber]

I need help with inserting fractions from the character palette. I see all
kinds of fractions there in every font but can't get them into Word,
InDesign or anything else. Or, is there a way to automatically get 1/2, 1/3,
1/4, etc. to look like real fractions the same way the "st" in "1st"
automatically superscripts in Word? Or, is there a font that has fractions
that will be compatible with Times. I have tried inserting a MS equation and
the results are not good. The people at Apple can't tell me anything. They
say they don't have a character palette. My iMac G4 has one but it seems
unusable.

 

[Elliott Roper]

I need help with inserting fractions from the character palette. I see all
kinds of fractions there in every font but can't get them into Word,
InDesign or anything else. Or, is there a way to automatically get 1/2, 1/3,
1/4, etc. to look like real fractions the same way the "st" in "1st"
automatically superscripts in Word? Or, is there a font that has fractions
that will be compatible with Times. I have tried inserting a MS equation and
the results are not good. The people at Apple can't tell me anything. They
say they don't have a character palette. My iMac G4 has one but it seems
unusable.

InDesign ignores the character palette doesn't it? It uses its own
"Insert Glyphs". At least my old version of InDesign does.

Word 2004 will insert anything you can find in character palette. It
stores its characters as Unicode, which can represent 65,536 different
glyphs. Just double click the character you want in character palette.
Word v.X uses Apple Extended as its character set, with only 256
possible characters in any font.
Character Palette is unicode based, and when using it to insert funny
characters into Word v.X, only those that are also in the Apple
Extended set make it through to your document. Nicely formed fractions
not included.
You *can* fake fractions using the autocorrect feature. My trick was to
use EQ (equation) fields. In 'replace' I had (1/2). in 'with' I had *
EQ \f(1,2) * which had to be pasted in there from a real field
expression.
I liked that because I could then change it for any fraction, but it
was as ugly as sin as you noted. There was another trick involving
superscripts and slashes which looked better, but not nearly as good as
real Unicode glyphs.

If you like pretty fractions, the easy way is to spend money on Office
2004. (Aside to Beth: You never thought I'd say that did you?)

PS. you can still use the autocorrect trick but with the real fraction
character in Word 2004 if you want to avoid cluttering your screen with
the character palette.

PPS. The support person at Apple who told you they do not have a
character palette needs a slap.

PPPS. Try using the character palette in Text Edit. It is Unicode savvy.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Barbara:

In Character Palette, you are looking at the Unicode character set, which
will show you every character a font has. If the people at Apple had looked
in the Apple Mac Help for the phrase "character palette" they would have
found a topic telling them how to do all of this.

Older Mac applications do not fully support Unicode. In other words, they
will "use" Unicode fonts, but they will display and print only the
characters from the old Mac character set.

You have not said which version of Mac OS or Word you have. People: Give
us a little help here: we CANNOT read your screen from here!! If you WON'T
tell us which versions of things you are running, we really can't help:
every version is different. Word 2004 is the first version of Word that
supports the fraction characters (Unicode hexadecimal 2153 through 215F).

If your browser or news client can correctly display Unicode, the fraction
characters for Lucida Grande appear here: â…“ â…” â…• â…– â…— â…˜ â…™ â…š â…› â…œ â… â…ž â…Ÿ

People who see only gobbledy-gook at the end of the sentence above, either
their reader does not support Unicode, or they do not have any fonts
installed that contain those characters. There should be 13 characters
there

To use them in Word 2004, place your insertion point where you want the
character, display the character palette, choose the character, and click
Insert With Font.

Please note: Character Palette shows you "characters, wherever they are".
This does NOT mean that the characters are in any given font: Character
Palette will first find the character, then tell you which font it is in.
Most of them are in Lucida Grande on the Mac. To get them from Times New
Roman, you would have to load a PC version of Times New Roman.

The font "Times" is an old Mac font that contains only the one half, one
quarter and three quarters fraction characters.

Hope this helps

I need help with inserting fractions from the character palette. I see all
kinds of fractions there in every font but can't get them into Word,
InDesign or anything else. Or, is there a way to automatically get 1/2, 1/3,
1/4, etc. to look like real fractions the same way the "st" in "1st"
automatically superscripts in Word? Or, is there a font that has fractions
that will be compatible with Times. I have tried inserting a MS equation and
the results are not good. The people at Apple can't tell me anything. They
say they don't have a character palette. My iMac G4 has one but it seems
unusable.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Folks- Especially Barbara & Elliott

Just a few comments to add:

Barbara;

Although you don't mention which version of Word you're using,

My iMac G4 has one

Suggests that you are using OS X, one version or another. As John indicated,
the problem you are having may stem from an older version of Word, but even
2004 will not provide fractions other than 1/4, 1/2 & 3/4 in the Times
font... Especially if it is an older version of Times that migrated with you
from OS 9. You might try using Times New Roman, instead of Times.

To go a little farther with the Character Palette:

A) make sure View: is set to Roman with 'by Category' selected
B) click the triangle for Font Variation to expand that portion of the
palette
C) set Collections: to 'Containing selected character'.

That will enable you to select a Category, click on a character/symbol, and
see what installed font collections contain that character.

Elliott;

FWIW- I'm using InDesign CS, & the Character Palette seems to work with no
problem... Assuming the correct font is used for the character desired.

Regards |:>)

 

[Elliott Roper]

Elliott;

FWIW- I'm using InDesign CS, & the Character Palette seems to work with no
problem... Assuming the correct font is used for the character desired.

Thanks. I suspected it might. I'm still on the original InDesign2.

Its always tricky deciding when it makes sense to get a later version
isn't it?

 

[Elliott Roper]

You bet... Especially when the shekels come out of your own pocket!
Un/Fortunately I don't have much of a choice as I _have_ to stay current on
everything, although my employer foots the bill for versions on the PC side.
Since I prefer Mac, I have to pay for most of those upgrades, myself... CS2
is on my Christmas List.

Heh! You need to upgrade your employer to the Mac version.

 

[Clive Huggan]

On 5/11/05 11:07 PM, in article 051120051207016557%[email protected],

If you like pretty fractions, the easy way is to spend money on Office
2004. (Aside to Beth: You never thought I'd say that did you?)

<snip>

Only *Beth*??? She ain't Robinson Crusoe, cobber!

Clive
=======

 

[Elliott Roper]

{Thud!!} Slowly picks jaw up from the floor...

Our most famous luddite has gone over to the Dark Side...

It is not too bad, either. A couple of things I was dreading, like the
animation of autocorrect and the comic book bubbles on track changes
are not as bad as I feared. And I love the long filenames and Unicode.

While you are logging usability bugs, what about the fiendish new way
of hiding modify style?

I made fingernail marks all over my screen before I found the
disclosure triangle hiding behind a pilcrow on mouseover in the current
style box under the style triangle of the formatting palette that is
reached by the view menu. For someone who only uses his mouse on
Tuesdays, that *was* a bit of a challenge.
What was wrong with the old format->style->modify?
Now that keyboard nav of the main menu bar in Tiger is very usable,
that mouseover idea is a step in the wrong direction. There has to be a
better way to see whether it is a paragraph or character style.

I know I could write a macro to bring up modify style with a keystroke,
but for a semi-newbie that would be a bit of a nuisance.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

While you are logging usability bugs, what about the fiendish new way
of hiding modify style?

I made fingernail marks all over my screen before I found the
disclosure triangle hiding behind a pilcrow on mouseover in the current
style box under the style triangle of the formatting palette that is
reached by the view menu.

You are right. That is a nightmare.

For someone who only uses his mouse on
Tuesdays, that *was* a bit of a challenge.
What was wrong with the old format->style->modify?

Well, it's still there as a menu command. Did you use to be able to get
Modify Style to come up with one click? I can get Format | Style off the
keyboard, but can't figure out how to use keys to click Modify.

Now that keyboard nav of the main menu bar in Tiger is very usable,
that mouseover idea is a step in the wrong direction. There has to be a
better way to see whether it is a paragraph or character style.

I know I could write a macro to bring up modify style with a keystroke,
but for a semi-newbie that would be a bit of a nuisance.

Indeed.

 

[Elliott Roper]

You are right. That is a nightmare.


Well, it's still there as a menu command. Did you use to be able to get
Modify Style to come up with one click? I can get Format | Style off the
keyboard, but can't figure out how to use keys to click Modify.

Oh No! I was *dreading* that answer. You really have 'style' still on
format on the top main menu bar? There isn't one on mine. Does this
mean I'll have to google all those "My menu is borked" posts.

Indeed.

heh! Looks like we both need that macro. It's good see another
musophobe[1] in here.

A first attempt failed miserably. Simple recording is no good. It won't
let me stop recording in the middle of opening the formatting palette's
modify sheet, and it only wants to record the effect of doing so. Off
to the manuals...

1. OK OK I made that word up. Someone who hates meeces to pieces.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

What was wrong with the old format->style->modify?

It's still there! Did it used to be accessible with a keyboard shortcut by
default? I'm a mouse person so I wouldn't have noticed.

Beth

 

[Beth Rosengard]

(Didn't realize the thread name had changed till after I posted on the old
one so ignore my post over there.)

Oh No! I was *dreading* that answer. You really have 'style' still on
format on the top main menu bar? There isn't one on mine. Does this
mean I'll have to google all those "My menu is borked" posts.
<uncontrolled sobbing>

Are you expecting to see Format>Style>Modify all from the main menu? That's
not how it works. You get a dialog box after Format>Style and *then* you
see a radio button for Modify. Are you not getting the dialog box??

Beth

 

[Elliott Roper]

Are you expecting to see Format>Style>Modify all from the main menu? That's
not how it works. You get a dialog box after Format>Style and *then* you
see a radio button for Modify. Are you not getting the dialog box??

I really hope we are at cross purposes here.
I have a format menu item, but no style in it. Is that the way it
supposed to be?
Format menu item contains Font.. Paragraph.. Document.. Bullets and
Numbering.. Borders and Shading.. Columns.. Tabs.. Drop Cap.. Text
Direction.. Change Case.. Autoformat... Theme.. Background.. Object...

A complete dog's breakfast, but no 'style...' like there was in v.X
(in between Theme.. and Background...)

Since there were changes in no longer needing the formatting palette to
be open with the font triangle down to make cmd-shift-s do anything
vaguely useful, that it was intentional to hide the modify style dialog
so thoroughly.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

I really hope we are at cross purposes here.
I have a format menu item, but no style in it. Is that the way it
supposed to be?
Format menu item contains Font.. Paragraph.. Document.. Bullets and
Numbering.. Borders and Shading.. Columns.. Tabs.. Drop Cap.. Text
Direction.. Change Case.. Autoformat... Theme.. Background.. Object...

A complete dog's breakfast, but no 'style...' like there was in v.X
(in between Theme.. and Background...)

Yep, you're missing the Style entry. It should still be between Theme and
Background. In case you've forgotten the fixes for this, here they are.

1) Tools> Customize> Toolbars. Select Menu Bar and click Reset. If that
doesn't do it ...

2) Incinerate Normal .

Cheers,

Beth

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Yep, you're missing the Style entry. It should still be between Theme and
Background. In case you've forgotten the fixes for this, here they are.

1) Tools> Customize> Toolbars. Select Menu Bar and click Reset. If that
doesn't do it ...

2) Incinerate Normal .

This one is actually nicely named--you can dig FormatStyle out of Tools |
Customize and put it where you like, if you don't want to mess with Normal.

They did deliberately remove it in WinWord at some point, but not in
MacWord. I jumped through hoops to bring up a default install in a user
account, and it's definitely there.

(You don't have a View | 5.1 Menus entry with a check, do you? That's the
usual "menus wrong" problem in Word 2004, though I didn't think a missing
Format |Style was part of that).

Daiya

 

[Elliott Roper]

Yep, you're missing the Style entry. It should still be between Theme and
Background. In case you've forgotten the fixes for this, here they are.

It waasn't so much as forgotten, it was an arrogant "this could not
possibly happen to me" attitude.

1) Tools> Customize> Toolbars. Select Menu Bar and click Reset. If that
doesn't do it ...

But it did. I love you to bits!

 

[Elliott Roper]

This one is actually nicely named--you can dig FormatStyle out of Tools |
Customize and put it where you like, if you don't want to mess with Normal.

They did deliberately remove it in WinWord at some point, but not in
MacWord. I jumped through hoops to bring up a default install in a user
account, and it's definitely there.

(You don't have a View | 5.1 Menus entry with a check, do you? That's the
usual "menus wrong" problem in Word 2004, though I didn't think a missing
Format |Style was part of that).

Nope. I have a new song (tune by George Gershwin)
"Beth, you is my woman now!"
In other words, resetting the menu bar fixed it. Do see my other post.

 

[Beth Rosengard]

Nope. I have a new song (tune by George Gershwin)
"Beth, you is my woman now!"

<vbg> (But doesn't she die at the end?)

Beth

 

[Roger Morris]

I really hope we are at cross purposes here.
I have a format menu item, but no style in it. Is that the way it
supposed to be?
Format menu item contains Font.. Paragraph.. Document.. Bullets and
Numbering.. Borders and Shading.. Columns.. Tabs.. Drop Cap.. Text
Direction.. Change Case.. Autoformat... Theme.. Background.. Object...

With a fully updated Word 11.2, I have the above under Format but with
the addition of Style in between Theme and Background.

(I've lost earlier posts so apologies if this is about a different
version)

 

[Elliott Roper]

With a fully updated Word 11.2, I have the above under Format but with
the addition of Style in between Theme and Background.

(I've lost earlier posts so apologies if this is about a different
version)

Thanks, no, you are right. I was whining about 11.2, and its all fixed
now.