unicode fonts (Word 2004)

[Ronald Florence]

I just fired up Word 2004 because the book-in-progress uses a number of
sources which need to be transliterated from Hebrew and Arabic in the
endnotes and some terms in the text which also require characters with
macrons or underdots, in particular Ẓ, Ḥ, and ḥ. (If your newsreader is
unicode-enabled those will come out Z, H, and h with underdots.)

I am having trouble finding a working font that will reproduce these
characters. My usual font (Georgia) shows them as an empty box. In the
Character Palette the only fonts listed as including these characters
are Chalkboard, Courier, Lucida Grande, and Monaco -- all of which are
ugly and inappropriate for a book manuscript. Are there reasonably
attractive serif fonts I could use instead? Please, if possible, not a
newspaper font like Times Roman.

Thanks,

 

[matt neuburg]

I just fired up Word 2004 because the book-in-progress uses a number of
sources which need to be transliterated from Hebrew and Arabic in the
endnotes and some terms in the text which also require characters with
macrons or underdots, in particular ?, ?, and ?. (If your newsreader is
unicode-enabled those will come out Z, H, and h with underdots.)

I am having trouble finding a working font that will reproduce these
characters. My usual font (Georgia) shows them as an empty box. In the
Character Palette the only fonts listed as including these characters
are Chalkboard, Courier, Lucida Grande, and Monaco -- all of which are
ugly and inappropriate for a book manuscript. Are there reasonably
attractive serif fonts I could use instead? Please, if possible, not a
newspaper font like Times Roman.

Try Gentium. m.

 

[Elliott Roper]

I just fired up Word 2004 because the book-in-progress uses a number of
sources which need to be transliterated from Hebrew and Arabic in the
endnotes and some terms in the text which also require characters with
macrons or underdots, in particular Ẓ, Ḥ, and ḥ. (If your newsreader
is
unicode-enabled those will come out Z, H, and h with underdots.)

I am having trouble finding a working font that will reproduce these
characters. My usual font (Georgia) shows them as an empty box. In the
Character Palette the only fonts listed as including these characters
are Chalkboard, Courier, Lucida Grande, and Monaco -- all of which are
ugly and inappropriate for a book manuscript. Are there reasonably
attractive serif fonts I could use instead? Please, if possible, not a
newspaper font like Times Roman.

This won't cheer you up. I have a few hundred fonts here, with quite a
few rich OTF families. Font book shows exactly your list for unicode
1E25 (the h with a dot under.) Looks like dot under is a typewriter
affectation.

If you really need these, they can be faked using the EQ field. When
you have it right, assign an autocorrect to it, like (h) and paste the
EQ expression into the replace with field. I faked fractions and
macrons like that for Word v.X which lacks unicode.

 

[Ronald Florence]

Looks like dot under is a typewriter
affectation.

If you really need these, they can be faked using the EQ field. When
you have it right, assign an autocorrect to it, like (h) and paste the
EQ expression into the replace with field. I faked fractions and
macrons like that for Word v.X which lacks unicode.

Thanks for the reply, even if the news isn't what I hoped for.

I don't know about "typewriter affectations," but underdots are standard
for transliterating the "ch" and other characters in Hebrew and Arabic.
I'm used to LyX and LaTeX where \d{char} effortlessly produces
underdot characters. I was ssurprised when Word.X could not do this,
and unhappy to find that Word 2004 only does it with a limited number of
fonts.

Your technique sounds intriguing, but after reading the help in Word
2004 I'm not sure I understand what it means to use the EQ field and to
assign an autocorrect to it. Could you point me to an explanation of
how to do this to set myself up to enter an underdot character like H
with a minimum of keystrokes? Thanks,

 

[matt neuburg]

Thanks for the reply, even if the news isn't what I hoped for.

I don't know about "typewriter affectations," but underdots are standard
for transliterating the "ch" and other characters in Hebrew and Arabic.
I'm used to LyX and LaTeX where \d{char} effortlessly produces
underdot characters. I was ssurprised when Word.X could not do this,
and unhappy to find that Word 2004 only does it with a limited number of
fonts.

Your technique sounds intriguing, but after reading the help in Word
2004 I'm not sure I understand what it means to use the EQ field and to
assign an autocorrect to it. Could you point me to an explanation of
how to do this to set myself up to enter an underdot character like H
with a minimum of keystrokes?

What about *my* reply? Did you look at Gentium as a possibility? m.

 

[Ronald Florence]

What about *my* reply? Did you look at Gentium as a possibility? m.

I wasn't diss'ing you: I cannot find Gentium among the fonts listed in
Word 2004 here, and hence was not able to test your suggestion.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Ronald:-
We discussed this here a while ago. A terse recipe is here
http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&ie=UTF-8&as_umsgid=<280920032
206394532%[email protected]%3E&lr=lang_en&num=20&hl=en

What about *my* reply? Did you look at Gentium as a possibility? m.

I'm interested. Where does it live?
hang on (google)
(download)
(Font Book)
*Wow* It is excellent, and free. Thanks Matt
Ronald, forget my kluge.
Elliott

 

[Ronald Florence]

OK, I found the Gentium font that Matt recommended. Easy to istall,
comes up fine in Word 2004, and (Yes!) it handles the unicode characters
I need to use. It is not especially attractive (better than Times
Roman, but no prize), but it is versatile and it comes up with the
correct characters not only on the screen, but in PDF and presumably in
printed output. Many thanks, Matt!

Now ... what happens when I submit a manuscript written in this font to
my publisher? Trade publishers expect manuscripts in ms-word, and they
use Macs, at least in the book design stage of production. If I submit
this manuscript with both the body text and endnotes in Gentium and the
editor does not have that font on his/her machine, what do they get when
they try to look at it on their screens? Do I have to send the font
with the electronic manuscript or tell them to dig it up and install it?

For what it is worth, trade publishers (Random House, Viking, St.
Martins, etc.) and university presses want manuscripts submitted in what
I call "lowest common denominator" format -- Times Roman, no different
fonts or font sizes for headings, etc. I've done enough books that I
can get away with some variations from that requirement, but if my ms.
requires the editor and production department to fetch a font off the
Internet, I can pretty much predict the reaction ... and it may not be
pretty.

Thanks again to both Matt and Elliot for prompt and helpful advice.

 

[Elliott Roper]

OK, I found the Gentium font that Matt recommended. Easy to istall,
comes up fine in Word 2004, and (Yes!) it handles the unicode characters
I need to use. It is not especially attractive (better than Times
Roman, but no prize), but it is versatile and it comes up with the
correct characters not only on the screen, but in PDF and presumably in
printed output. Many thanks, Matt!

For what it is worth, trade publishers (Random House, Viking, St.
Martins, etc.) and university presses want manuscripts submitted in what
I call "lowest common denominator" format -- Times Roman, no different
fonts or font sizes for headings, etc. I've done enough books that I
can get away with some variations from that requirement, but if my ms.
requires the editor and production department to fetch a font off the
Internet, I can pretty much predict the reaction ... and it may not be
pretty.

Gentium was a pleasant surprise to me too. (Thanks again Matt)
I think the Gentium authors permit you sending the font to the
publisher. IANAL but they seemed to say so on.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium
"Gentium is freely available and may be used by anyone at no cost. It
is not public domain, and cannot be altered, but can be given to anyone
who might need it."
I guess you have a pretty good case for getting Random House to accept
it. I'm pretty sure that if you fronted up with an Ms full of my EQ
kluge and one with it set in Gentium, they would take the latter.

On the other hand a university publisher would prefer LaTeX surely?
If I were a publisher, I'd be running LaTeX courses for all my writers
and supporting a TeXniXal ;-) department for creating special TeX
macros for guys like you who need runes more than you need fonts ;-)

As an aside, I spent a little time this morning looking for LaTeX tools
that support unicode. I am still a bit confused about what might work.

I have not yet sprung for Word 2004, so I don't yet have first hand
experience with Word's unicode, but I'm fearing the worst and teaching
myself LaTeX and emacs. Something I should have done years ago.

Warning! Long boring aside follows:-
...not to mention a rambling introduction..
When programming, my preferred editor is teco. I use it in a command
mode where the bottom three lines of the screen show my commands and
the rest shows what a mess I have made of the text. People who see me
at work walk away shaking their heads and mumbling what seems to sound
like "dinosaur".
Keeping emacs and teco apart is strangely difficult. My fingers know
teco. Emacs is similar but different and equally full of arcanity. You
should be able to keep your thinking about layout *almost* separate
from your thinking about content. Thinking about driving the text
editor should be halfway down your spinal column if not right in your
fingertips.
Word /almost/ gets this right, except that you know two things
1. What you see is as good as you get
2. Your reader/publisher won't see it that good
(Gosh, that sounds like the first and second laws of thermodynamics!)
....so you get the visual clues, supported by outline view when you need
it for keeping your subject thoughts in a row. This is good. What is
not so good is that when the numbering goes wrong, or the styles go
doolally, you have to swap to typographer mindset before you can
continue.
LaTeX on the other hand, keeps those tasks apart. Too far apart. It
forces another mindset on you, that of skillfully driving your text
editor to navigate the logical structure of your writing.

I have been playing with LaTeX because I am getting increasingly
irritated with Word's capriciousness. So many of the things it thinks
it is helping me with are an annoyance. Sometimes it makes something
that should be easy far too hard. To be even-handed, there are lots of
little 'helps' that really do help ;-)

What Word needs is an author/publisher view. Perhaps all that we don't
have is a set of templates and page set-ups. Ronald, you could probably
help me here. What do the publishers give you in the way of templates
and styles and procedures to make your dealing with them efficient?

It would do Word's developers no harm to look carefully at TeX and
LaTeX (I know, they are way ahead of me here - EQ fields are a nod
toward TeX) and work out a way to get some of the good bits into Word.

Right, that's enough Monday quarterbacking, and its only Saturday.

 

[Ronald Florence]

Elliott Roper wrote:

On the other hand a university publisher would prefer LaTeX surely?
If I were a publisher, I'd be running LaTeX courses for all my writers
and supporting a TeXniXal ;-) department for creating special TeX
macros for guys like you who need runes more than you need fonts ;-)

I have a book coming out early November from the University of Wisconsin
Press <http://www.18james.com/blood-libel.html>. I submitted the ms. in
LaTeX; they insisted that it be translated to ms-word; we settled on
rtf, but most of the structure of LaTeX is lost in the translation.
Alas in history and fiction, university and trade publishers want
"ms-word" submissions despite its obvious weaknesses as a format and as
an editor/formatter.

As an aside, I spent a little time this morning looking for LaTeX tools
that support unicode. I am still a bit confused about what might work.

I have not yet sprung for Word 2004, so I don't yet have first hand
experience with Word's unicode, but I'm fearing the worst and teaching
myself LaTeX and emacs. Something I should have done years ago.

You might want to try LyX instead of the emacs/LaTeX combination, and
since you're in a Mac newsgroup, LyX/Mac. It is a WYSIWYM (what you see
is what you mean) editor which uses LaTeX as the formatting engine. See
http://www.18james.com/lyx-mac.html for screenshots and a howto. (I'm
somewhat prejudiced: I did the port.) For what it is worth, I still
take notes and do code in emacs, and wrote a couple of books with emacs
& LaTeX before I discovered LyX. My fingers think in emacs.

What Word needs is an author/publisher view. Perhaps all that we don't
have is a set of templates and page set-ups. Ronald, you could probably
help me here. What do the publishers give you in the way of templates
and styles and procedures to make your dealing with them efficient?

Publishers (at least trade and university presses in fields like history
or fiction want a manuscript that is effectively not formatted -- all in
one font and fontsize, including the headings, one file per chapter.
Unlike publishers of scientific books and science journals, who prefer
the work effectively camera-ready (hence LaTeX) trade publishers want a
manuscript that they can feed into their editing, copy-editing, and
design/layout software. It's frustrating, but after eight books I've
stopped fighting, which is why I have switched to ms-word despite it's
obvious weaknesses, unreliability, and annoying mis-features.

I've always thought the three most wrenching experiences are divorce, a
new agent, and changing editor/formatters. Still married to the same
woman, but got a new agent this year after 25 years with the former
agent, and switched from LaTeX/LyX to ms-word. No wonder I'm such a
grump and curmudgeon.

 

[Elliott Roper]

Elliott Roper wrote:



I have a book coming out early November from the University of Wisconsin
Press <http://www.18james.com/blood-libel.html>. I submitted the ms. in
LaTeX; they insisted that it be translated to ms-word; we settled on
rtf, but most of the structure of LaTeX is lost in the translation.
Alas in history and fiction, university and trade publishers want
"ms-word" submissions despite its obvious weaknesses as a format and as
an editor/formatter.


You might want to try LyX instead of the emacs/LaTeX combination, and
since you're in a Mac newsgroup, LyX/Mac. It is a WYSIWYM (what you see
is what you mean) editor which uses LaTeX as the formatting engine. See
http://www.18james.com/lyx-mac.html for screenshots and a howto. (I'm
somewhat prejudiced: I did the port.) For what it is worth, I still
take notes and do code in emacs, and wrote a couple of books with emacs
& LaTeX before I discovered LyX. My fingers think in emacs.


Publishers (at least trade and university presses in fields like history
or fiction want a manuscript that is effectively not formatted -- all in
one font and fontsize, including the headings, one file per chapter.
Unlike publishers of scientific books and science journals, who prefer
the work effectively camera-ready (hence LaTeX) trade publishers want a
manuscript that they can feed into their editing, copy-editing, and
design/layout software. It's frustrating, but after eight books I've
stopped fighting, which is why I have switched to ms-word despite it's
obvious weaknesses, unreliability, and annoying mis-features.

I've always thought the three most wrenching experiences are divorce, a
new agent, and changing editor/formatters. Still married to the same
woman, but got a new agent this year after 25 years with the former
agent, and switched from LaTeX/LyX to ms-word. No wonder I'm such a
grump and curmudgeon.

Wow! I couldn't have asked a better source. I'll get LyX in the
morning. Thanks. I hope your new book does well. The advance reviews
make it sound quite tasty.

 

[Gene van Troyer]

I wasn't diss'ing you: I cannot find Gentium among the fonts listed in
Word 2004 here, and hence was not able to test your suggestion.

You can Google it. It's free, and it's beautiful, and it was created for
exactly the use to which you wish to put the other fonts you mentioned.

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium

From the friendly linguists at the Summer Institute for Linguistics.

Gene van Troyer