Ornament fonts: problems in recent MAC OS

[Tobias Baskin]

Recently, having upgraded to Mac OS Sonoma (14.7.1), I am having problems with various ornament fonts (dingbats) on my Mac. I understand that the MAC operating system has changed the way glyphs are handled. In the "old days" glyphs were assigned to letters but no longer. Supposedly, if you bring up the 'character viewer' and select the category of 'dingbats', you will see the ornament fonts and can insert from there; but this is not working on my computer: most of them are not listed and ones that are have only some or none (!) of the glyphs shown and those few shown will not insert into a document. Font book thinks these fonts are validated. In font book, I can select a glyph in the "repertoire" view, hit the 'copy' button, but only rarely will the glyph actually be able to be pasted in to a document. Fonts that have stopped working include Bodoni ornaments, Type embellshments, Hoefler Text ornaments, and some others. Because searching on line does not bring up a lot of help, I am wondering if something odd is happening with my computer? I'd really appreciate any help or suggestions. Thanks. Tobias

[Ralf Herrmann]

In which apps exactly do you try to paste these symbols?

Using a standard Unicode character palette will of course not be too helpful. It shows you glyphs encoded with the proper Unicode value. A symbol font being matched to the a regular Western 8-bit encoding will not be compatible with that, let alone some obscure symbol encoding. And FontBook will probably also fail to copy something useful into the clipboard. 

In general, what you are seeing is non-Unicode fonts being phased out. You might need to get updated versions of these fonts. But it will depend on the app. I know InDesign for example can show and access glyphs by their glyph ID. The encoding doesn’t matter and even unencoded glyphs can be accessed this way. But only using InDesign’s glyph palette. At least for now. Adobe has also officially dropped support for older font formats. 

[Tobias Baskin]

Thank you. Typically, just MS Word or Powerpoint. Do you know if these programs have a way to command an insertion of a non-Unicode glyph?  How do I tell if a font is sold as "Unicode" or not? Is that going to be given in the specs somewhere? And is that really the only solution? I have quite a few of these. Thanks for your help. 

[Steven Skaggs]

Just tried out Rieven Uncial Pro (which includes a large selection of ornaments). Here's a screen shot from an InDesign file. These are accessed from the Glyphs palette by double clicking. No problem.

[Ralf Herrmann]

InDesign is pretty robust in that regard. It can even place completely unencoded glyphs from the glyph palette. 

[Tobias Baskin]

Stephen, thank you. Um, out of curiosity, would you mind seeing if a text editing program (e.g., word) can see that font in its font list? Or whether you can cut and paste a glyph from font book into a text editing program? (I assume you are on a Mac). By the way, that is a handsome font. Thanks again. Tobias

[Steven Skaggs]

Tobias, you're right. I never use a text editor for actual design but when I just tried it (in Pages) I found that even pasting from Font Book didn't seem to function. Thanks for the kind words on the font by the way – Rieven Uncial won a TDC2 back in 2010. (DelveFonts.com if you're interested in purchasing…)

[Tobias Baskin]

This is one instance where I wish I wrong. I keep hoping I can discover some magic setting on my computer. The situation is very odd: some ornament fonts are cut-and-pasteable thru Font Book and others are not. And the situation with Mac phasing out non-Unicode encodings does not seem to be widely appreciated. I would have expected more of an uproar. But maybe people who are habitual fleuron users work with programs like In-Design that seem to be able to cope. Apparently, ornament fonts sold on Myfonts are Unicode compatible, although it doesn't say as much anywhere I could find on their webpage (I contacted their support). They have an instance of Rieven but it does not seem to include the ornaments. I did look at Delve Fonts and I would be sorely tempted to purchase. Except as you discovered I think they won't work on my system. Things are still ok on my laptop, it is still on Ventura. But not at work.  Sigh. Thank you. Tobias