2 Intaglio problems

Legacy Intaglio
1

Just purchase Intaglio, and have come across two problems.

  1. Applying the Bold command to subscripted text produces ‘doubled’ text rather than bold

  2. The Symbol font does not work (other typefaces do, so I don’t know what is different about Symbol). I can get a Symbol font by inserting it using the systems Character Palette.

And here is one suggestion. The way in which text is super- or sub-scripted is not logical. Why is the Text adjustment listed under the Fill window?

Thanks,
Paul

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2

In answer to my first question, I have discovered that you cannot apply the Bold command (shift-command B, or via Text menu) to type faces such as Geneva that do not have ‘built-in’ bold typefaces. Using a typeface such as Helvetica the Bold command works.

So, there is a work around, but this is still a bug/feature that should be fixed.

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3

The Symbol font problem is not Intaglio. Before OSX, the characters in dingbat-type fonts such as Symbol were accessed by pressing A-Z, 0-9, etc. Most applications were limited by the available key combinations—around 220 characters. Things changed with OSX. Special characters could be accessed in several different ways—via special features, via the Character Palette, or by typing Unicode values, but how do you know what to type? It’s a bit complicated…

For example, to access the ‘Heart’ character in the Symbol font, go to the Finder’s Keyboard menu (next to ‘Date and Time’) and choose ‘Unicode Hex Input’. In Intaglio, hold down the Option key and type 2665. The four numerals are replaced by the heart symbol. When you hover the cursor above a character in the Character Palette, a yellow label shows the Unicode. Typing code is a bit too geeky for me, but some people like it.

There’s more about this in OSX Help. Type ‘dingbats’ in the search field. You may have to be online to access the pages, however.

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4

Thanks for your answer Ian, that’s very interesting. I wonder whether Intaglio developers could have a more user-friendly way of accessing these symbols. It would be very useful to have quick access to Greek letters, as these are used frequently in scientific technical figures.

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5

Thanks for your answer Ian, that’s very interesting. I wonder
whether Intaglio developers could have a more user-friendly way of
accessing these symbols. It would be very useful to have quick
access to Greek letters, as these are used frequently in scientific
technical figures.

It’s about the only thing I don’t like about the way OS X works. I
use a lot of symbols in my work, and it’s much harder work to get at
them on the Mac than it was on the PC. It’s a small price to pay
though, when compared to all the other advantages of Mac over PC!

Phil

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6

Font Features are another, arguably better way of accessing special characters. Font features can be found in GX fonts (also known as AAT fonts) and OpenType fonts. Both formats use ‘glyph substitution’ to replace standard letters with special characters.

To access font features, open the Font Panel (Command-T) and click the ‘Gear’ icon at the bottom, left-hand corner of the panel. In the menu that appears, choose ‘Typography’. The ‘Typography’ palette that appears lists the available features in the current font. Helvetica has one feature— ‘Common Ligatures’, but Apple Chancery, Hoefler Text, Zapfino have lots of extra features.

GX fonts are Mac only, so Windows users will see gibberish. Special characters can always be converted to outlines and the document saved as a PDF, which should display correctly in the Windows version of Acrobat Reader. PDFs with ‘live’ GX special characters may render correctly in Windows, but I’ve not tested this.

OpenType features work on both platforms, but you’ll need a font editor to create them. The industry standard FontLab costs serious money.

Simple GX features are straightforward to create and you can do it for free. Features are appended to TrueType fonts with a small text file, called a Morph Input File (or MIF). The instructions in the MIF ‘map’ or link special characters to standard letters.

I’ve never needed to typeset languages and don’t know Greek, but I did a test with the font Tahoma, which includes the glyphs for several languages including Greek. I mapped ‘Gamma’ to the letter ‘g’, Theta’ to ‘t’, etc, installed the font and the Greek characters displayed correctly in Intaglio, Text Edit and several other programs that support the OSX text engine.

Once you’ve got this working with one font, it’s straightforward to apply the procedure to other fonts. For example, the thousands of symbols in the Apple Symbols font include pointed fingers, arrows, audio, Braille and box connectors. Accessing the characters could be simplified by creating special categories and mapping to standard keys. It’s non-standard, but much easier than remembering Unicodes.

The procedure for creating font features is convoluted. It involves using several Classic Mac apps and a text editor. If you’d like me to go into more detail, please let me know.

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7

The bold command works in a similar fashion to bold commands in classic Mac applications. That is it applied a “synthetic” bold to the text by smearing the text image slightly. A better way to get bold text is to choose the bold variation of the font you’re using, but if there isn’t such a variation the synthetic bold may be useful.

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8

The trouble is that the “synthetic bold” does not seem to work well — rather than a smearing, the text is doubled.

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9

I don’t know what you mean by “doubled”.

I’m not sure exactly what the system does for synthetic bold. I think it scales it in the direction of the baseline to make it appear wider. It’s similar to the synthetic italic which skews the text to give it a slant.

In any case if the synthetic bold doesn’t work for you the best solution would be to choose the bold variation of the font in the font panel.

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