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Topic: More Cyrillic font problems (Read 4782 times) previous topic - next topic

More Cyrillic font problems

For several years I have been using Slavonic fonts with NWC, quite successfully.  In fact, I have some problems with these in MS Word, but not in NWC.

However, I have also tried to use an old-orthography Russian font.  I have three of these which seem in reality to be two, one appearing under two names.  XSerif Old Russian and WPCyrillicA appear to be one and the same; I believe this font comes from France.  Elizabeth is from Russia.  This fonts work well enough in MS Word (they are all True-Type fonts), but I have problems both in Open Office and in NWC.  In NWC the letters appear as question marks.  Why don't they work, and is there a solution?

Stephen

Re: More Cyrillic font problems

Reply #1 –
My (educated, but wild) guess: The fonts may be encoded so that the characters are in non-Latin code locations.

What to do about it: In NWC, go to page setup, fonts, select the font in question (lyrics, or whatever), and modify. Toward the bottom of the modify dialog box, you'll see a menu of "scripts (Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, etc.)." It is not obvious, but this can be scrolled to provide a choice of code pages. Pick one that seems likely, and try it.

In Open Office, it may be that you have an out-of-date version of OO. Until the recent versions, OO did have a problem handling some fonts with non-Latin encodings.

Technical explanation: Prior to the introduction of 2-byte Open Type and Unicode fonts, True Type fonts (as well as Type 1 fonts) expressed each character as 1 byte. That allowed for 256 different codes, many of which were resrved for non-visible control codes such as tab or page break. The remaining codes, from about 192 to 200-something depending on operating system, were more than sufficient to include the letters, numerals, and punctuation of the Western European ("Latin") languages, including things such as accented vowels.

But a font could contain more than 256 characters. To do this, the font contained an arbitrary number of "code pages," each of which had 256 character codes. The basic Latin set and controls were on one page. Cyrillic would be on another page, and so forth. Only one page could be used at a time, so that each character could still be represented by 1 byte.

Now, with 2-byte Open Type Unicode fonts, it is possible to use thousands of characters simultaneously. But even so, most non-Asian applications simply draw their characters from a 256-code subset, as before.

Re: More Cyrillic font problems

Reply #2 –
It's nothing that simple.  For the Slavonic fonts, I have to use Cyrillic script encoding.  For Latin with diacriticals, I have to use Baltic or Central European.  I do all these things routinely.  The two fonts in question offer a selection of Western or Cyrillic, and display nothing but interrogation points with either.

Stephen

Re: More Cyrillic font problems

Reply #3 –
Then, it's a complicated problem (but you already knew that).

What yo can do, as a last resort, is export each page of your NWC composition to a Windows metafile via Print Preview > Copy. If you place the metafile into some word processing programs, you can ungroup it and edit the individual components (such as changing lyrics font).

A better method, for your circumstance: Don't bother with the lyrics in NWC. Place metafiles into word processing documents, and simply add the lyrics on top of the metafile using the word processor's own capability. You will want to insert the text using drawing tools. You will also want to ensure that the inserted text has a transparent, rather than white, background.

Re: More Cyrillic font problems

Reply #4 –
Follow-up: It seems that the problem was solved by re-coding the fonts. Happy ending.

Re: More Cyrillic font problems

Reply #5 –
Robert A. writes:
"Follow-up: It seems that the problem was solved by re-coding the fonts. Happy ending."

How do you do this?

Using Internet Explorer View->Encoding set to Cyrillic Windows, I can write and see cyrillic right here in this response window, for example:

Áëàãî åñòü ñëàâèòü Ãîñïîäà!

But all I get is question marks when I enter cyrillic into the NWC Lyric edit window.

Re: More Cyrillic font problems

Reply #6 –
By "re-encoding the fonts" I did not mean anything that a user can do. I meant internal changes to the font file itself, made with a font editing program. In other words: The system didn't have to be changed; the font had to be changed. The problem under discussion was specific to those fonts.