Re: Several questions

[Nick Lamb <njl tlrmx org>]

On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 17:24 -0700, chase321 wrote:
> 3) I cannot seem to get symbol fonts to work on my system at home.  They
> work under Windows XP on my office computer, but not under Ubuntu Studio
> 7.04 at home.  They work in Abiword, so the fonts seem to be installed, but
> they won't display in Gnumeric.

You may not be able to use Symbol fonts in the way you expect.

Gnumeric is primarily a Unicode application, so it considers e.g.
character number 65 to correspond strictly to U+0040 a Latin capital
'A'. If you pick a font which doesn't have a capital 'A' in it (for
example it only has apothecary symbols, or various arrows), Gnumeric
won't use that font to display that letter, but will use a substitute
which does have the Latin capital A.

If the symbols you need are from a known human language or are common
dingbats or other types of well known symbol (such as the suits from
card games, symbols for chess pieces, currency signs...) then you can
enter them with Unicode

There is probably a utility / application called "Character Map"
installed in your Ubuntu system. You can use this to search the whole of
Unicode for characters you want, and to copy them for pasting into
Gnumeric. If your symbol font has the character correctly coded then it
should appear as you expect.

If you know the Unicode "code point" for a character you can also enter
it directly, by holding Control, Shift and U (an underscored lower case
U should appear) and then typing the code point number, e.g. U+2022 is
the • bullet.

If the Symbol font doesn't provide a Unicode table, or contains curious
symbols not included in Unicode (e.g. company logos, Klingon) then I
don't know whether Gnumeric can render them at all. Jody? Does Gnumeric
provide any way to bypass Pango and put glyphs on screen directly ?

Nick.