Thoughtful, detailed coverage of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, plus the best-selling Take Control ebooks.

 

Is it a Unicode Font?

To determine if your font is Unicode-compliant, with all its characters coded and mapped correctly, choose the Font in any program (or in Font Book, set the preview area to Custom (Preview > Custom), and type Option-Shift-2.

If you get a euro character (a sort of uppercase C with two horizontal lines through its midsection), it's 99.9 percent certain the font is Unicode-compliant. If you get a graphic character that's gray rounded-rectangle frame with a euro character inside it, the font is definitely not Unicode-compliant. (The fact that the image has a euro sign in it is only coincidental: it's the image used for any missing currency sign.)

This assumes that you're using U.S. input keyboard, which is a little ironic when the euro symbol is the test. With the British keyboard, for instance, Option-2 produces the euro symbol if it's part of the font.

Visit Take Control of Fonts in Leopard

Submitted by
Sharon Zardetto

 
 

Take Control News/09-Oct-06

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"Real World Mac OS X Fonts" Encapsulates Font Ebooks -- Summer disappeared all too quickly for us this year, in part because of a major project we were working on to convert Sharon Zardetto Aker's "Take Control of Fonts in Mac OS X" and "Take Control of Font Problems in Mac OS X" into a print volume. We're pleased to announce that "Real World Mac OS X Fonts" is now available from Peachpit Press (and thus from all your favorite purveyors of print books, though if you buy it from our site, we and Sharon make a few cents more through Amazon's affiliate program). The text in "Real World Mac OS X Fonts" is nearly identical to the contents of the ebooks, with small redundancies between the two ebooks removed and a few minor things updated; we also moved from our Take Control layout to the full-color design of Peachpit's highly regarded Real World series. That's the series that graphics and design professionals turn to for the most detailed information about topics ranging from Photoshop and InDesign to color management and print production. "Real World Mac OS X Fonts" fits in perfectly with the rest of those professional-strength titles, so if you've been thinking about buying the ebooks but would prefer to read on paper, check it out.

 

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