Different fonts, alphabets, diacritical marks

[stephen.r]

I want to compose a file including both straight word-processor text and musical examples in NoteWorthy Composer, with lyric texts in Slavonic (both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets) and Hungarian (the object is to reproduce the original sources as closely as NWC will permit). This is the sort of thing for which I downloaded Open Office; I am familiar with MSWord and still use it except when its limitations make it impossible to get the results I want.

This is such a case: MSWord accepts NWC files reluctantly, badly, and never with stability. Open Office is much better at this sort of thing, and if I can become familiar with it I will gradually make it my everyday word processor. But I find it very hard to learn from the help files how to perform many everyday operations. I found a message in this forum on how to suppress the page number on page 1; but this was some time after I had found nothing in the help files and could not figure it out (MSWord makes this as easy as can be, and Open Office could do likewise if motivated).

Now I find a problem with the various fonts and alphabets I need for the project described in the preceding paragraph. I can get *some* diacritical marks, but not the c-caron, although I switched the language to Slovak. I can do this for files within MSWord with the Word character map ("insert symbol"), but this will not work outside of Word, so I use the Windows character map, or more often Character Map Pro, when preparing texts for NWC (one of the truly dumb things about Word is have a character map that is useless in any other program). I have to specify which font I want NWC to work, and once I have done that it works fine. Now I find that some fonts, whether cut from a preexisting Word file and pasted into the OO text or used for lyrics in a NWC file, produce only boxes.

How do I get OO to recognize these fonts? How do I get it to give me a c-caron (c-hacek, c-makcen) in texts I compose in OO?

And why is it so hard to find answers to such questions?

Stephen

[stephen.r]

Here's some more detail on yesterday's post:

I have three Cyrillic fonts with civil-style old-orthography letters. One of these, WP Cyrillic A, cannot be used with NoteWorthy Composer because the font does not have a hyphen! (Is this crazy or what?) The other two are XSerif Old Russian and Elizabeth TT. They have essentially the same encoding except for old-orthography characters.

I have prepared a file in NWC with the lyrics in XSerif Old Russian and the same file with the lyrics in Elizabeth TT. They look fine in NWC. I then put each in turn into Print Preview and hit the copy button. I copied the files as “Clipboard (Windows-format Metafile)” and pasted them into an Open Office file. In each case the music looks all right in Open Office, but the text is reduced to a bunch of boxes. I also tried copying the files in the alternative manner, as “Placeable Metafile (*.wmf)”—I have no idea what this is, but it seemed worth trying. Pasting this into the Open Office file produced bizarre results: no music at all, and the text was all right except for the lines containing old-orthography characters. One of these was converted to Latin-alphabet gibberish, the other to a row of boxes.

I will post this message in both forums (NoteWorthy Composer and Open Office and hope that someone can provide a solution to the problem of Slavonic text in an NWC file and then copying it into an Open Office file. (I have not yet attempted this with the old-style Slavonic Cyrillic letters, for which I have several fonts, because the source I am trying to reproduce used the civil style. I hate to think what problems I will have when I try to use a Slavonic font with the alphabet in the old style.)

Stephen

PS. Also had a file with text in Hungarian. This worked fine in NWC and also when I copied into OO file--including the long umlauts, which as far as I know do not exist in any other language.

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried replacing the "gibberish" you get in OpenOffice using the Insert -> Special Character feature of OO?

Just trying to help.

[The Liquidator]

Hi

On the stuff you copy and paste, I wonder whether you might have better luck if you paste it into openoffice draw from where you have a number of export options (BMP, JPG etc) which you can then import into the text.

Alternatively, instead of copying and pasting, try saving the WMF as a file if you can which you can then "import" into the document (insert\graphics\from file). People have reported better results doing it this way than by simple copy and paste.

Ian