Glyphs in Hoefler Text Ornaments font do notdisplay in Office Programs

D

DrTrabold

Version: 2004 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Processor: Intel I am having difficulty getting characters from Hoefler Text Ornaments, an Apple system-supplied TrueType font (unicode based, version 6.1d4e1; 2008-09-16), to display or print in most Office programs (Entourage excluded--it types and cuts and pastes there). While the font functions perfectly in Office X versions, it does not in both Office 2004 and 2008 programs, Entourage exempt in the latter two.

According to Apple, the characters are glyphs, and are accessible in the Mac character palate as such and function properly in Apple designed programs. This has proven to be true for me for Apple's TextEdit (I can't verify tech-reported functioning in Pages). However, there, in TextEdit, the glyphs now are not accessible as regular key characters and must be either double-clicked to function or click-and-dragged into place in that program--a pain--whereas the font used to function in that program and Office by simply typing a normal keyboard character or finding that character in Word using the insert symbol menu item first and memorizing the key. That no longer functions--the symbol palate in 2004 programs display Roman text characters for the ornaments version of the font and is no help.

The use of the character palate as a go-between (or simply typing) functions in Entourage (your tech support individual's recommended test), but the procedure does not function for Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. Nor does cut and paste from TextEdit.

Something has obviously happened to the way most Office programs access fonts such that this "compatibility" issue arises. Considering this is a problem in both 2004 and 2008 editions of Office, one would have assumed that this issue would have been addressed by now. Alas, no.

One would also expect that Microsoft would utilize the Mac system character palate as way to input special characters and such appears to be the case with normal letter characters, and it does function for two glyphs, but two glyphs only--a left and right pointing hand. But it doesn't work for any other glyph. Although I haven't installed 2008 on this computer yet, I believe that is the way things are now handled. The old symbol palate has disappeared, unfortunately, if memory serves correctly.

If something in the works here to fix this issue or is there a work-around that no tech support individual (two levels up the proverbial ladder) has not yet heard of or discovered, let me know. Considering the power-users (Google and Walmart, according to Apple) do use this font regularly, I would think this issue would have been addressed earlier, especially considering Office has gone through two major revisions since Office X.

Looking for an answer so that I don't have to totally redo a 700 page, five-years-in-the-making college text,

Dr. William E. Trabold
 

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