Font substitution for non supported unicode character

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Hello,

I am using the "uptack" character (U+22A5) in axis labels. In Igor 7, I just insert the character with its unicode and it works nicely. The problem comes when I want to export the graph (pdf or eps). This character is not supported by the Arial font, as far as I can tell. So I imagine that to display the character, Igor has to substitute some font that does include this character (Arial Unicode MS for instance). But I am not sure what happens when exporting. Either Igor is not at all embedding the substituted font or it is trying to embed something derived from the original font (Arial by default). When I look at the properties of the generated pdf when I choose to embed fonts I see that there is a Type3 font. So I suspect this is what happened. Either way it does not work. Checking with the "TrueType outlines.pxp" file provided, I see indeed that outlines does not work for this character in Arial, as expected.
The solution I use is to explicitly use a font that does support this character (Arial Unicode MS) but I find it not so convenient since it does look ok in the Igor graph but not after exporting (even with embedded fonts).
Is there any other way to solve this?

Julien
Quote:
Is there any other way to solve this?


I'm not the expert but I don't think there is any practical way to solve it. It is the OS that is doing the substitution for missing characters when drawing on screen. (My observation is that it works better on Macintosh than on Windows.)

It may work on Macintosh if you print to PDF or use Quartz PDF rather than Igor PDF.

It may work on Windows if you print to PDF. Windows 10 has this capability.

It is still better to choose a font that supports the character you want to use. Otherwise you wind up with an oddball character in the output.

August 29, 2017 at 08:47 am - Permalink

hrodstein wrote:


I'm not the expert but I don't think there is any practical way to solve it. It is the OS that is doing the substitution for missing characters when drawing on screen. (My observation is that it works better on Macintosh than on Windows.)




Thanks for your answer.
I am on Windows, I should have given this information.
You mean that when I look at a graph in Igor, missing character substitution is done by the OS and Igor has nothing to do with it?

hrodstein wrote:


It may work on Windows if you print to PDF. Windows 10 has this capability.



I have tested on both 7 and 10. Indeed print to pdf works for the characters. But size/layout is not taken care of properly.

Julien

August 29, 2017 at 09:32 am - Permalink

Quote:
You mean that when I look at a graph in Igor, missing character substitution is done by the OS and Igor has nothing to do with it?


Yes.

August 29, 2017 at 10:33 am - Permalink