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Styling in BDAG


Helen Brown

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With Rod Decker's permission I am transferring here a thread relating to BDAG from the current discussion on the Blog on the future prospects for Accordance. After commenting on Accordance in general he started this subject. We have continued the discussion by email.

 

But to balance the equation, there are some things that Accordance needs to do. I finally broke down and spent the big bucks this past fall for BDAG (my 3d! copy--the other two being paper). I have been very disappointed in the the e-version. The conversion to screen has been only partial and a lot of formatting that is *semantic* has been omitted. The bold and italic type faces in BDAG are *semantic* and not having them in the Accordance version means that I cannot use it to teach the class how to use the paper version (or the e-version) effectively. I'm a bit embarassed to show the Accordance version next to either of hte other two e-versions on the other platform. I *hope* this is fixed soon.

 

Dr. Rod Decker

Sun Mar 23, 12:08:00 PM

 

 

Blogger Helen Brown said...

 

Rod,

 

Thank you for your continued support of Accordance even in a PC environment.

 

The text styling is certainly important in BDAG, and we do have it. I suspect that you have OS X with the font smoothing turned on in Accordance. This requires a font with all the styles, it can no longer interpolate an italic style if the font does not have it (such as Geneva or Lucida Grande). Please try a different font such as Times New Roman or Helvetica. You can prove my point by turning off the font smoothing in Preferences/Appearance: the styles will show but of course the text will be ragged.

 

To everyone, please do let us know about any problem you have with Accordance or any module. The fix may not always be as quick, but we will try to help.

 

Sun Mar 23, 02:22:00 PM

 

Blogger Dr. Rod Decker said...

 

Interesting indeed. I would hope that is somewhere in the BDAG install instructions--but I apparently missed it entirely. It's not a real simple fix to figure out and takes some trial and error. What are the specific font requirements? I was using Gentium which *does* have an italic face, but no bold--but the italic did not display. I assume that no .dfont can be used? And not all ttf fonts that have bold and italic faces installed work either. E.g., Minion Pro (with bold, italic, and bold-italic) does NOT work--the bold appears, but not the italic. The font I'd really like to use if Cambria, one of the new Vista fonts, but when I select Cambria as the Tools font, all I get for the *entire* BDAG window are square "missing characters" boxes! Yet it has all the faces and displays correctly in Font Book and other apps. Yes, Times New Roman *does* work--but in the Library/Fonts folder that shows only the roman face (no bold or italic--I assume it must be a "suitcase" font?)! There some font issues here that aren't obvious or intuitive. Some clarification would certainly help. Accordance *ought* to be able to use any installed ttf font that has the requisite faces.

 

Sun Mar 23, 06:03:00 PM

It seems he is using 10.4 on a G4 that does not support Quartz Extreme, but the font smoothing is working, albeit many fonts do not display the styles in Accordance.

 

We know that in Leopard certain fonts do not work at all in the User Notes. Does anyone else have specific font display problems with English fonts? Please be specific as to the font name and your system.

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With Rod Decker's permission I am transferring here a thread relating to BDAG from the current discussion on the Blog on the future prospects for Accordance. After commenting on Accordance in general he started this subject. We have continued the discussion by email.

It seems he is using 10.4 on a G4 that does not support Quartz Extreme, but the font smoothing is working, albeit many fonts do not display the styles in Accordance.

 

We know that in Leopard certain fonts do not work at all in the User Notes. Does anyone else have specific font display problems with English fonts? Please be specific as to the font name and your system.

 

I am using 10.5.2 on a PowerBook G4 1ghz with Quartz Extreme Supported and font smoothing set to Automatic in preferences and font smoothing turned on in Accordance. After reading this thread I discovered that all along I had been missing the italicized fonts in Accordance and just never realized it. I too have BDAG and when I switched to certain fonts the italics worked and with other fonts it did not. My fonts of choice were Minion Pro and Myriad Pro (of which I have the entire set of both) but neither of them work correctly in Accordance showing italics. That surprised me because they are standard issue Mac fonts. I switched to Adobe Caslon Pro and it works correctly but it is not my first choice. Palatino, Verdana, Arial and Helvetica all worked but their leading is too tight for me to read.

 

Only the basic Accordance set of fonts works correctly for me in User Notes. If I turn on the full set of fonts then the notes go wacky and display gibberish.

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Any update on this topic?

 

I recently tried to use the font Cardo, but the leading in Accordance smashes all of the lines of text together.

 

All of my native Accordance fonts display fine, but with the rest of my Font library it is a toss up. Some work and some don't without any real rhyme or reason.

I have deleted the font cache, resolved any duplicates and all the rest of the font fix techniques but to no avail.

 

No other program I have has any trouble displaying the fonts in my library and the fonts that work in Accordance work great.

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For what it's worth, I had trouble with the Cardo font in NeoOffice, too. The NeoOffice developer discovered that "Cardo font has a missigned descent value. Specifically, all fonts bundled with Mac OS X have negative descent values whereas Cardo has a positive descent." This NeoOffice bug report has more details on that problem.

 

So it is possible that the real problem lies with Cardo and not with Accordance. On the other hand, it's possible there's no connection between the issues with Cardo in NeoOffice and the issues with it in Accordance. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about fonts or programming to know if there's a connection or not.

 

Lorinda

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So it is possible that the real problem lies with Cardo and not with Accordance. On the other hand, it's possible there's no connection between the issues with Cardo in NeoOffice and the issues with it in Accordance. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about fonts or programming to know if there's a connection or not.

 

And correct me if I'm wrong, but Cardo has never been finished, correct? And currently, there is no active work being done to it. This makes me hesitant to use it, even though most of what's been done looks quite nice.

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We will be looking at the issue of why some fonts are not behaving properly in Accordance and leopard, and hope to fix it for the next rev. Cardo is a Unicode font, for use outside Accordance. I was not aware that it is incomplete.

 

William: please give me the names of some "standard" fonts that no longer work in User Notes.

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Cardo is a Unicode font, for use outside Accordance. I was not aware that it is incomplete.

 

According to http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html version .98 of Cardo was released in November 2004. A version 1.0 was supposed to be released in February 2005, but as far as I know, it never was.

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This font problem is NOT Leopard-specific. My original question was in a Tiger context. I'm in the process of switching to Leopard on a new Mac right now, but that's a question for a different topic.

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Yes, we are looking into the fonts issue right now, Tiger and Leopard, but it is quite complex. We hope to have it fixed for the next release.

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We will be looking at the issue of why some fonts are not behaving properly in Accordance and leopard, and hope to fix it for the next rev. Cardo is a Unicode font, for use outside Accordance. I was not aware that it is incomplete.

 

William: please give me the names of some "standard" fonts that no longer work in User Notes.

 

Helen,

 

Arial, Georgia, Minion Pro and Myriad Pro show up as Hebrew in the User Note display, but appear correctly in the Edit window.

 

Times, Helvetica, Futura all look correct in both windows.

 

Of course I have way more fonts, this is just a sampling.

 

William

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We are looking at this issue right now, but it's a difficult one.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I discovered today that the font Zapf Humanist 601 by Bitstream does not work at all with Accordance. It just displays Lucida Grande even though it says Zapf Humanist 601. A similar looking free font called Epigrafica that has a much larger character set does work with Accordance however.

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