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Font versions affects Unicode output System
Today I was editing a file for a medical journal when I ran into a font problem that, while fairly obvious I suppose, is one that still may catch a few people by surprise. Essentially, it is this: Not all versions of the same font have Unicode support, and, depending on where they're installed, Font Book may give preference to earlier versions over newer versions.

For example, the document I was editing used Times New Roman, but featured a bunch of Unicode-based greek letters to connote certain medical thingamajigs. However, the thingamajigs kept displaying as boxes -- i.e. no such character existed. It turned out the the version of Times New Roman that I was using was outdated, even though I had a newer version already installed.

MS Office 2004 installed the newer version of the font in my user's ~/Library/Fonts folder. The one installed by Apple with the OS was installed in the top-level Library/Fonts folder. When you open Font Book with two versions of the same font, they naturally register a conflict, but because the older version of the font is in the root /Library/Fonts/ folder, it takes precedence over the newer version in the user-level Library/Fonts folder when you elect to 'Resolve Duplicates.'

That means that if you're not paying attention, you'll probably disable the version of the font that gives you Unicode support. In my case, the version in my user's Fonts folder was version 3.05, and the one in the root Library folder was 2.60. When I blithely Resolved Duplicates, Font Book disabled the newer version due to its secondary location.

Once I disabled the old version and enabled the newer version, the missing Unicode characters properly displayed within my document (before and after shot). For what it's worth, the earliest version of Times New Roman that supports unicode seems to be 2.76.
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Font versions affects Unicode output
Authored by: jammjamm on Apr 13, '05 10:17:39AM

Isn't the UNIX way to let user-level prefs override the system-level? That way makes the most sense too, to allow users to change their prefs without needing the root password...



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Font versions affects Unicode output
Authored by: Safar on Apr 13, '05 11:24:43AM

i ran into a similar problem with office X... Any idea where i can get the latest version of Times New Roman without buying office 2004 ?

thanks



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Downloading unicode TNR
Authored by: john1620b on Apr 13, '05 11:53:53AM
I think you can get it here.

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Re: Downloading unicode TNR
Authored by: Uncle Asad on Apr 14, '05 01:04:07AM

No, the fonts in the link above are old, too. They might have a few more glyphs in the Roman ranges, but for all intents and purposes, they're still the "non-Unicode" versions. Alas, the only way to get Unicode MS fonts is to buy Office 2004 :-(

(Unless Apple happens to bundle them in 10.4 to replace the ancient versions bundled in 10.3 and below...early adopters let us know!)



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Re: Downloading unicode TNR
Authored by: ttv on Apr 14, '05 03:31:59AM
There is a Sourceforge project for making the original Windows Web Core Fonts (Arial, Times New Roman and others) available for X systems. Actually, these fonts can't be downloaded from Microsoft anymore but they are available here: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/font-tool/xf86-corefonts-0.2.1.tar.gz?download.

Download the tgz file and unpack. You'll get a number of .exe files for the fonts but fortunately these .exe files are simple .zip files repacked for automatic extraction. Drop the .exe files on StuffIt Expander and it will unpack them. Now you have a number of Windows .ttf files for each font (one file for each type style: regular, bold etc.).

These font files work perfectly in Mac OS X. They are Unicode fonts covering an extended Latin repertoire, Cyrillic and Greek.

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Re: Downloading unicode TNR
Authored by: Safar on Apr 14, '05 10:42:16AM

thanks, i'll give it a try (otherwise i will download the evaluation version of office 2004) just to get the fonts



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Font versions affects Unicode output
Authored by: nmerriam on Apr 13, '05 01:43:34PM

I admit I'm surprised that the system-level font overrides the user font. I wonder if this may well be a bug, as I can't think of anything else that does this (unless it's an executable with path priority).



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Font versions affects Unicode output
Authored by: bedouin on Apr 13, '05 06:49:31PM

This is a problem [url=http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040815080133453&query=Arabic]Arabic[/url] speakers have known about for a long time.



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Font versions affects Unicode output
Authored by: theilgaard on Apr 14, '05 09:02:03AM

I think the description in this hint is a little missleading, or at least seems to be reason to some confusionn among readers.

The hint describes which fonts are disabled, if you use the feature of FontBook to omit duplicates. By default FontBook does all it features on the users local fonts folder (located in ~/Library/Fonts). That must also be the reason to the fact that apparently it also disables fonts in this folder if a duplicate is found.

BUT if Times New Roman is installed in both /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts, the one installed in the latter location will overrule the one in the system. This is at least what Apples documentation describes is the way the font handling routins of the system works. (and what another user is suggesting is the normal UNIX behavior).

The order is the following:
~/Library/Fonts
/Library/Fonts
/Network/Library/Fonts
/System/Library/Fonts
and lastly the Classic font folder

This list answers how the system handles the Apple Systems fonts, like Monaco and Geneva, in both the classic system and in OS X without conflict.



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Font versions affects Unicode output
Authored by: PeteVerdon on Apr 18, '05 07:24:03PM

As others have said, this is back-arse-wards. User preferences should override global ones.

Pete



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