# Scribus Forums

## Scribus => Beginner Talk => Topic started by: Engineering_text on March 30, 2022, 10:19:47 pm

Title: use symbol font instead of glyph
Post by: Engineering_text on March 30, 2022, 10:19:47 pm
This question surely exists somewhere but in searching variations of symbol font and glyph I could not find it. I'm using Scribus 1.4.8 with Windows 10.

Scribus has the "symbol regular" font available in the drop down box, but I can't use it. If I edit text in any other font, and want to change the font, no problem -except when I try to change to symbol font. In that case, I get red boxes instead of the Greek symbols. I can insert glyphs -but that is a much more tedious process than just selecting letters and changing the font. I'm editing an engineering text. There's a lot of Greek letters.

Surely there is a way to get the symbol font to be used in the same manner as other fonts. It seems irrational that this can't work like any other font. I checked under preferences, and all the boxes for symbol regular font are checked -just like the other fonts I use. It's a True Type font, and the path to the font is C:\Windows\fonts\symbol.ttf

I've verified the path is correct. I'm not receiving any error messages. If this is just the way Scribus works -why treat symbols font differently than all the other fonts?
Title: Re: use symbol font instead of glyph
Post by: Nermander on April 02, 2022, 11:59:08 am
This is a matter of character codes.

Essentially Scribus uses unicode character coding, which mean the normal letters and the symbols in the Symbol font have different character codes. If you apply the Symbol font to a normal text the Symbol font does not have any glyphs for those "normal" character codes, and you get the red boxes.

You likely need to use Insert->Glyph or identify the correct unicode codes for the symbols to be able to insert them.
Title: Re: use symbol font instead of glyph
Post by: Engineering_text on April 08, 2022, 08:41:41 pm
Of course I am still confused. Within Scribus, which uses unicode, running in Windows 10 -which uses unicode, is offered the symbols font just as other fonts are offered in a drop down list. If I choose to convert the letter "r" for example, to any other font in the drop down list -it works. The letter r will appear in the other font. I would assume Scribus is using unicode for all fonts. So I still don't understand why the symbols font is treated differently. Why even offer it as a font choice if it can't be used as a font?

Having said that, clearly Scribus in this case works differently from how I would like it, so it's time to move on and find out how to achieve what I am trying to do in a more efficient manner.

If you know an efficient means for replacing letters with Greek glyphs throughout a large document, that would be great. Maybe one of the methods below A,B, or C. Or a better and efficient method someone has already worked out.

Plan A: Ideally, I would like to type something into the original text as I write it in my word processor that Scribus would interpret correctly when imported. I get that layout and paragraph style is left to the desktop publishing. But it would help tremendously if subscripts and "glyphs" -which are the content not the layout, could be read from my word processor file. Maybe there is some code I can use in the text file? (Similar to, but not, HTML tags.) Do I need to specifically export files from the word processor as unicode?

Plan B: How can I put the dozen or so glyphs I use onto a small pallette (instead of having two large menus on my screen). That would be a big plus.

Plan C: Is there a way to type some code into the body of the text while in text editor to get subscripts and glyphs -that might allow better use of search and replace?

Safe to say I average a few glyphs in every paragraph of my book. Here is my intolerably tedious method so far:
Where "rho" represents unicode 0xF072
I want to replace rC with "rho"C.
In Scribus text editor I select the letter "r".
Still in Scribus text editor I use the path Edit|insert glyph
I then choose the yellow grid box representing "Show/hide enhanced pallette"
I then scroll down in enhanced pallete to display only "symbol regular".
I then double click on  "rho"
I then select "insert"

Then I've got one glyph inserted. If I'm lucky and the same glyph is in several places nearby I can cut and paste. More typically, I have to close the two menus because they block so much of the screen, and I have other editing to do since subscripts and don't carryover from the original text either.
Title: Re: use symbol font instead of glyph
Post by: Engineering_text on April 08, 2022, 11:13:15 pm
The problem is much worse than I thought. I used Scribus for years to publish a newsletter. Doing an engineering text with subscripts and symbols font has some real challenges:

If one changes the paragraph style, subscripts and "glyphs" are lost. Even if the only change in the style is tab settings. By "lost" I mean the subscript letters are there, but no longer subscripts. The glyphs convert to red boxes both in text editor and in the layout view. One would expect the subscripting and use of glyphs to occur BEFORE applying styles since those are the content and styles is formatting the layout of the content.

If one chooses to use copy/paste with a single glyph, or with any single character, if the glyph or character came from a paragraph with a different style -even if the only difference is tab setting, the paragraph you paste the one character into will change to the style of the paragraph the character came from. If you then revert the paragraph style back to what it was, the glyph you inserted will become a red box. If what you inserted was a few characters with a subscript -the subscript is lost. Example rC becomes rC. So if I try to bypass the tedious process of inserting a glyph (because symbol font doesn't work) I can't cut and paste a glyph into a paragraph with body text style into a paragraph with list style -even when they employ the same font, font size, and line spacing. Even if I did all the cut and paste before applying styles, once I then apply styles -the glyphs and subscripts will be gone.

If in texteditor you choose to insert a glyph, in page layout the glyph will appear as a redbox. So why even provide the option to insert a glyph in texteditor? If I replace the letter "r" in rC with the glyph for Greek letter "rho", I have a better than 50% chance the glyph will take on the subscript characteristic of the letter that follows it. I can't in layout mode change undo the automatically applied subscript. I can't undo it in texteditor either. That would result in a redbox replacing the glyph in layout view. the only reliable workaround is to replace the entire rC -which mean I can't just past in "rho" where it is followed by other subscripts.

Symbols font, chosen from dropdown menu within Scribus, does not work. So why is it even in the drop down list?

Please point out that I am using the software wrong, or mistaken in what I have experienced. I really hope I am wrong because this software prevents doing my work flow in the expected manner. I expect to create my content, text and illustrations, in some other software. Import the text into Scribus where I apply styles for headers, body text, lists, etc. as my last step in layout. Instead, I find I have to keep re-editing my text within Scribus in a remarkably tedious way because of the quirks mentioned above.

Even if I save my text in odt format, and "Get text" pulls it into texteditor with subscripts intact and even the same font as the odt file (I turn off the overrides during import). As soon as I apply a style, even if the only attribute of the style is to specify a tab setting -the subscripts are lost, effectively changing the content I imported. I also found that even in odt format, characters in symbols font are lost.

Scribus was nice for newsletter, posters and such things. It seems totally inept for technical publishing unless I learn LaTex or Tex just to have Greek letters and subscripts.

Again -please tell me I am wrong and there is a logical and efficient way to accomplish this in Scribus. This wasn't a problem with PageMaker over 20 years ago. So I'm not exactly asking for the impossible.

Title: Re: use symbol font instead of glyph
Post by: Nermander on April 18, 2022, 08:59:44 pm
Of course I am still confused. Within Scribus, which uses unicode, running in Windows 10 -which uses unicode, is offered the symbols font just as other fonts are offered in a drop down list. If I choose to convert the letter "r" for example, to any other font in the drop down list -it works. The letter r will appear in the other font. I would assume Scribus is using unicode for all fonts. So I still don't understand why the symbols font is treated differently.

Scribus is trying to show you the letter r from the Symbol font, but the font does not contain the glyph for letter r.
Title: Re: use symbol font instead of glyph
Post by: Engineering_text on May 16, 2022, 11:09:55 pm
What is a practical way to insert a Greek letter? The ones I use the most are lower case: beta, omega, rho and pi. By practical, I mean not having to go through the long series of menus.

I tried typing "rho" and then using find and replace to replace rho with the glyph for the Greek letter of that name -but Scribus appears to have no way to do that.

I'd like to try setting up a custom keystroke, but it appears custom keystrokes can only be setup for commands in the Scribus provided list.

This is pretty crazy that Scribus makes it so difficult to use Greek letters.
{"extraction_info": {"found_math": false, "script_math_tex": 0, "script_math_asciimath": 0, "math_annotations": 0, "math_alttext": 0, "mathml": 0, "mathjax_tag": 0, "mathjax_inline_tex": 0, "mathjax_display_tex": 0, "mathjax_asciimath": 0, "img_math": 0, "codecogs_latex": 0, "wp_latex": 0, "mimetex.cgi": 0, "/images/math/codecogs": 0, "mathtex.cgi": 0, "katex": 0, "math-container": 0, "wp-katex-eq": 0, "align": 0, "equation": 0, "x-ck12": 0, "texerror": 0, "math_score": 0.8827190399169922, "perplexity": 1858.4738581044667}, "config": {"markdown_headings": true, "markdown_code": true, "boilerplate_config": {"ratio_threshold": 0.18, "absolute_threshold": 10, "end_threshold": 15, "enable": true}, "remove_buttons": true, "remove_image_figures": true, "remove_link_clusters": true, "table_config": {"min_rows": 2, "min_cols": 3, "format": "plain"}, "remove_chinese": true, "remove_edit_buttons": true, "extract_latex": true}, "warc_path": "s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2022-33/segments/1659882572408.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20220816151008-20220816181008-00414.warc.gz"}