Greek Font Problem...

[muki]

I transformed a xml file to indesign tagged-text using xslt. I transformed every greek entities to unicode. But when I imported the tagged-text, some of the unicode values were not displayed, most of it are the diacritical characters. I used the font Times New Roman but I think it has no effect on it since it is unicode.

I was wondering if there is a way in making the indesign (CS 2) to display unicode values. Thanks.

[AdobeAce]

Hi muki,

To see the unicode values of any character, open your Glyphs palette (Window menu > Type & Tables > Glyphs) and run your cursor over the glyphs in the palette stopping on any character. A little yellow hint box should pop up giving you the unicode value of that particular glyph.

I ran into a similar problem a couple of weeks ago designing a poster in Czech -- you may want to try a different type face such as Times instead of Times New Roman. Not all characters exist in all Type 1 or TrueType fonts so sometimes just changing faces solves the problem. Times worked for me.

If that doen't work, try an OpenType font such as Garamond Premier Pro. OpenType fonts can have thousands of characters as opposed to just 256 in standard Adobe Type 1 or TrueType fonts. (Garamond Premier Pro has nearly 2500 characters including a lot of Greek glyphs.)

Hope this helps!

Ace

[muki]

You are probably referring to the encoding of the character for its font, am I right?
Not its unicode value. I am trying to look for a font that has the support for the greek fonts (specifically the polytonic Greek fonts) but still I have no luck because Times and Arial do not seem to support those fonts. I'll just update you. Thanks for the reply. Btw, the document I want to produce has also non-Greek characters, so I cannot use the fonts that only support Greek characters.

[AdobeAce]

Hi muki,

As I mentioned previously, take a look at OpenType fonts which were developed jointly by Adobe and Microsoft. These fonts are not only crossplatform (Mac-PC), they are made for documents in which you need to have more than one language,

Here's what www.myfonts.com has to say about OpenType --

_____________________________________________

"Using Unicode character indexing, a single OpenType font file can contain all the characters necessary for use in large number of languages.

OpenType and multiple languages

Several font foundries are already offering multilingual OpenType versions of their fonts. In addition to the common western European languages, these also cover Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Turkish, and more. Fonts are even appearing that cover Cyrillic and Greek too, all in the one font file.

Of course, it was possible to print Russian, Greek and Polish before OpenType. What’s the big deal, you might well ask? The answer lies in the use of unified character codes, or Unicode. This means that documents are saved with their character codes intact. They will survive moving from one machine to another, and their text will survive being copied from one application to another, or even e-mailed.

For example, with old font formats it was not possible to print a document which included both French and Polish accented characters without changing fonts. With Unicode and OpenType fonts, all the thousands of characters in Unicode are available to an author, and changing the font is something you can do throughout document creation.

Note that the decision to design characters for multiple languages remains with the type designer. When you buy fonts at MyFonts.com, we advise you to check which languages a font covers before purchase.

Please also refer to our International section for more information regarding OpenType fonts with multilingual support."

___________________________________________

Sounds exactly like what you're looking for. :)

For more infomation go to -- http://www.myfonts.com/International

Hope this helps!

Ace

[muki]

Ace,

Now I kind of get it. Open type fonts uses the same character mapping used in unicode, am I right? So that's why if I will used it as my font, my hexadecimal values is the same as those in the unicode. Sorry if I am still not so good at this but I will read about these. Anyway, thanks a lot for the explanation. :)

Muki

[AdobeAce]

Hi muki,

The following is a link to a lot more information about OpenType on Adobe's Website.

http://store.adobe.com/type/opentype

Hope this helps!

Ace