Typophile

mac os leopard/lion - problem with unicode slot U+13000-U+13427

lama su

Hello, I have I little problem with some fonts on snow leopard/lion.

I am trying to use the egyptian hieroglyphs (unicode slot: U+13000 - U+1342F), but it seems they don't work on leopard.

I have installed the font "gardiner" (you can find it in this website: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ and directly download it from here: http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/Gardiner313.zip ) and in fact I can see the characters in the character palette, but when I open a file, or I run an application using this set of characters, my computer does not recognize them, and it shows only the classical series of black squares.
As for instance, I cannot see any hieroglyph in this test page http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/egyptian-hieroglyphs.html , or in this page of wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Unicode , even though my font is correctly installed.

I tried it on lion, and it didn't work too. Curiously, it worked well on tiger.

What is the problem? It is a problem with the font? Or for some reason apple is not able to deal correctly with this unicode slot?

thanks in advance

Michel Boyer

I just installed the font on OSX 10.7.1 and I have no problem seeing the hieroglyphs in either of the test pages you mention.

lama su

are you using safari or mozilla? My problem is with safari, and with some basic applications (as for instance the input methods)

Michel Boyer

Yesterday, I made a fast check with Safari and Firefox.

I now checked on OS X 10.6.8 and Safari does not display the glyphs of the links above. On the other hand, I can insert the hieroglyphs in TextEdit from the character palette.

Michel Boyer

On OS X 10.6.8, the font also seems to work fine with Word 2011 for Macintosh and with Firefox.

Jens Kutílek

Maybe the problem is related to the issue described here: http://www.fontgeek.net/blog/?p=523

How did you install the font on your system?

David Yoon

Both test pages work fine for me with the Gardiner313 font in Safari on Leopard (Safari 5.0.6 on OS X 10.5.8). Insertion into TextEdit via Glyphs view in character palette also works. (On that machine, I have no active font management program in use.)

Michel Boyer

I tried again with Safari 5.0.5 on OS X 10.6.8; this time I called explicitly Gardiner in the html source of this thread, which is just a copy of the wikipedia table whose link is above, to which I added

<font face="Gardiner">

before the table and

</font>

after. Then the hieroglyphs display fine. So, Gardiner displays correctly in Safari; the "problem" seems to be that it is not used as a fall back font for Egyptian hieroglyphs (I simply installed Gardiner313.ttf in /Library/Fonts)

lama su

"So, Gardiner displays correctly in Safari; the "problem" seems to be that it is not used as a fall back font for Egyptian hieroglyphs (I simply installed Gardiner313.ttf in /Library/Fonts)"

that is interesting. I tried with other fonts I created using the same unicode slots, and they have the same problem, it seems that not only Safari, but the mac OS system in general (I tried also in other applications, e.g. with a specific Input Method) does not have a fall back font for Egyptian Hieroglyph (Possibly, Mozilla uses some different approach to identify the font). The char palette works because it display all the fonts using those slots.

Does anyone know if there is a way to solve the problem? If there is a way to force the system to recognise a specific font as fall back font for these unicode slots?

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