Recently in Macintosh Category

I was able to upgrade to Leopard recently on my Mac which means I'm able to manipulate a working version of Arial Unicode MS for the Mac...yeah.

Web Display

My blog actually switched to Arial Unicode because of the way I had coded the CSS. It was very legible, but the x-height seemed smaller in comparison to the Apple Lucida Grande - so I reordered the priority. I will have to see if I can download Lucida Grande onto Windows via the Windows Safari download.

Back to the Logic Symbols in Word

Most of my recent Unicode adventures have been about inserting logic symbols like (∨,∧,⊃) into Word (and later Excel). My main struggle has been that if I insert them from the Character Palette, the font switches to Symbol... which is OK until I start typing English. At that point I will stop outputting the English alphabet and σταρτ ουτπυτιν τηε γρεεκ αλπηαβετ. Greek is great...unless you're typing English text. I was using the left arrow key quite a bit.

Now that Microsoft has developed a working version of Arial Unicode MS, I can input the symbols without switching over to Greek. The only gotcha is that I have to shif old logic symbols out of their pre Arial Unicode fonts (thank goodness for keyboard shortcuts). What I'm hoping is that I can bypass the big font switch in Windows word too.

So I'm happy to say that we're adding another small step towards Unicode compatibility. Finally I can have logic symbols in a non-Greek, non-Japanese, non-Chinese font!

The Insert Symbol Tool in Word

As I said last entry, I'm working on a symbolic logic course and am learning new quirks for dealing with with Unicode logic symbols...and one of them apparently is the Microsoft Word Insert Symbol tool (this is found by going to Insert » Symbol in most versions of Word.

Like the Windows Character Map and Mac Character Palette, the Insert Symbol tool lets you insert single characters into a document so you can change "P implies Q" to the logical formulation P ⊃ Q or P → Q depending on your symbolism (and you can also switch between "P and Q," P & Q or P ∧ Q).

But...unlike the Windows Character Map/Mac Character Palette, the Insert Symbol tool can take you on a little detour out of standard Unicode and into the Microsoft Private Use Area block - or the block where vendors can define their own characters. For instance, when I tried to insert the character ∩ (union) into a document, I noticed that the Insert Symbol palette gave a code point of U+F0C7 instead of the expected U+2229, and yes the U+F0 code is a sign that you are in the Private Use Area.

First I should say that there is a rationale for this. You'll notice that the font in the graphic is set to "Symbol" which is an older pre-Unicode font which was used to insert lots of special mathematical symbols. The Private Use set-up undoubtedly prevents a lot older documents from breaking.

So What?

If all you're doing is using with Word, the Insert Symbol tool may still be working for you. But these days, more and more documents are actually destined for the Web or some other format...and not all tools recognize the Microsoft Private Use codes.

The way I first noticed that the logic symbols weren't standard Unicode was that some logic symbols did not "convert" well to HTML in Course Genie but mysteriously became things like "(". The ones I had inserted properly converted, but not the ones inserted with the Word Symbol tool. Ugh.

The use of proper Unicode versus an older format does have a real world impact.

Summary

To avoid the Private Use function in new Word documents just always use the WWindows Character Map and Mac Character Palette. On Windows, you may need to switch the font to Arial Unicode.

Or if you're especially insane, you can develop your own logic symbol keyboard utility.

I'm not on Leopard yet - I suspect our tech support staff would like the kinks to be shaken out first, but Multilingual Mac is making good notes on the new Unicode features which are available.

It's kind of buried, but the OS X release that the Microsoft fonts Arial Unicode, Tahoma, Microsoft Sans and others will now be shipping on the Mac.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

This is a good sign that Apple is moving towards full interoperability with Windows OTF fonts (at the recent IUC 31 conference, they said OTF support for Arabic was complete).

And also, it's good to have Arial Unicode as a test font since that's what's what's on the Windows platform. I have installed older versions of Arial Unicode on the Mac for testing purposes before, but it never did work quite right.

Mac is also promising other international enhancements including Braille support, true Persian support, Tibetan and Kazakh, expanded character palettes and as well as expanded Chinese, Korean and Japanese support

COMBINING ACCENTS (Improved)

The good news is that Safari 3 is handling combining accents better (these are Unicode characters which are placed on adjecent letters).

I didn't want to let this improvement pass unoticed!

VERTICAL TEXT (Not really)

The tb: rl CSS attribute used for vertical text in Internet Explorer is still not working. Then again it's not working in Firefox either. In other words, few browsers are supporting vertical text.

In addition to the iPhone, Apple recently released a Beta of Safari 3 for BOTH Mac and Windows. Either version can be downloaded from www.apple.com/safari/ .

There were some Unicode glitches in Safari 2, and some got fixed in Safari 3, but others are the same.

FONT APPEARENCE (Improved on Windows)

It's the same on the Mac side as in Safari 2 (quite acceptable), but I think Windows users will notice a significant improvement in font presentation especially if they are still on Windows XP.

An improvement in anti-aliasing in Safari 3 means fonts will appear crisper/cleaner in general than either Firefox or even Internet Explorer 7. No matter what script you're using, I believe this is generally a good thing.

ARABIC TEST (Windows dicey, Mac OK)

I am not an expert in the Arabic script, but results suggest that the Windows Safari does not render all the joinings correctly, but the Mac Safari does do an acceptable job. I checked the Arabic on Safari for Windows vs IE for Windows and noticed some differences in letter forms.

I suspect the culprit is that Safari may be relying a bit on Mac AAT font technology which does not exist on Windows.

TAMIL TEST (failed on both)

One of the major failings of Safari and other Mac browsers was the inability to process vowel signs on scripts from South India (e.g. Tamil). The vowel marks would appear, but not be placed correctlly.

Alas, this problem still persists...even on the Windows side. The South Asian vowel sign problem does not appear to be fixed.

FONT CONTROL (Not enough for Windows)

The font control options in Safari 2/3 are restricted to just Western European languages. On the Mac, this means that you will default to some system font (usually Lucida Grande) if it's available. Ugly but readable.

On the Windows side, the lack of font control means you COULD have the right font available, but Safari 3 WON'T be able to find it.

For instance, I tested a Syriac page in Safari 3 (Win) and IE 7 (Win). IE 7 correctly implemented the Syriac font (Estrangelo Edessa), but Safari 3 (Win) missed it completely and gave me just a bunch of boxes.

Safari does implement CSS...so in theory, a developer could specify the Windows fonts for Syriac text, but what a pain.

NOTE: Safari 3 (Mac) DID find my third party Syriac font.

CONCLUSION

If you're browsing main-stream languages (English, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, Hindi, Central European), then Safari seems to function well and has crisper fonts to boot.

But for the exotic languages, results will vary, especially on the Windows platform.

Mac Unicode guru Tom Gewicke has a Multilingual Mac Blog at
http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/

He also offers many freeware Unicode keyboard utilities at
http://idisk.mac.com/thgewecke-Public?view=web

Go ahead Mac users and read away!