![]() (5) Is there an Apple paper, or more general one, that describes the general principles behind the modern way of handling fonts? I sometimes find with issues like this that information is either too basic or too advanced, intended mainly for developers. So perhaps it also finds this font a little suspect.) ![]() Illustrator CS3 presents this font in angle brackets () in its fonts list, like one or two other fonts. (4) What is it about Devanagari MT that prevents it from appearing in the font list for Word 2008 and FreeHand MX? (I haven't investigated, but I suspect that there are some other fonts in this category. (3) If the name is significant here, what name should be used? (2) Putting this question the other way round, what are the defining attributes for a glyph that would enable it to display correctly in all applications and on the Internet. (1) What exactly are the defining attributes for a glyph variant? For changing the code and name in Adobe Garamond Expert worked fine.Ī few questions arise from these experiments: It would seem from this that neither the Unicode nor the glyph’s name is what determines whether a glyph is a variant or not. However, the standard Unicode name for this glyph is ‘DEVANAGARI LETTER A’. The corresponding glyph in Devanagari MT has the same Unicode, but with a name ‘adeva’. Investigating Arial Unicode MS in TypeTool, I find that U0907 (index 1383) has the correct Unicode with a name ‘uni0905’. I can insert these characters into InDesign, with the warning “This is a glyph variant it may not be displayed correctly in other applications or on the Internet”. I can see these glyphs in the Glyph window for Arial Unicode MS, but Character Palette tells me again, “The current application (Word) does not support glyph variants”. However, they did not appear as alternates in the collections pane of the Code Tables window. To get around this problem, I discovered that Arial Unicode MS, also distributed with Leopard, contains the Unicode devanagari glyphs: U0900-U097F. ![]() So this could not just be a Microsoft problem it seems to be more systemic. Safari, Firefox, TextEdit, InDesign, and Illustrator all recognize Devanagari MT OK. So at first I thought that this was just a Microsoft problem. Checking on the Microsoft forum, I saw that people were having many problems with the way that Word handles fonts. ![]() However, when I tried pasting some of these characters into Word, Word did not recognize the font. Safari displayed the characters in the alphabet quite OK, apparently using font Devanagari MT, distributed with Leopard. Doing some research into the languages used by early civilizations, I looked at Wikipedia’s page for Devanagari, the alphabet of Sanskrit and many modern Indian languages. I could let the matter rest there, but I have recently come across another problem with glyph variants and would like to understand the general principles underlying this concept. At the moment, I am using Word mainly as a drafting tool and InDesign is not powerful enough for the long, complex book I am writing. Eventually, I plan to convert my Word documents to FrameMaker running under Windows under Parallels desktop, where I can use OpenType fonts. However, unless I pay $99 for TypeTool, I cannot really use this font because TypeTool corrupts some of the glyphs. Character Palette recognized characters 0-9 as standard glyphs and I could use the font in Word 2008 just like I had done with Word 2004. So, as an experiment, I created a new font from Adobe Garamond Expert with the name ‘one’ and Unicode 0030. There I found that glyph 49, for instance, has a name of ‘oneoldstyle’, with no Unicode. So I took a peek under the covers with the demo version of FontLab TypeTool 3. I have searched the Apple web site and the Web for a precise definition of glyph variant, but have not found one. However, with Leopard and Word 2008, which I have on my new Intel iMac, this font stopped working, with the message in the Character Palette: “The current application does not support glyph variants”. So in Tiger, I used this font successfully in Word 2004. This worked quite well as a character style with FrameMaker until Adobe stopped supporting it. I have been using Adobe Garamond Expert since the old Mac OS 9 days mainly for old-style numerals.
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