Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 36535
Impossible to enter non italic greek characters
Last modified: 2012-11-07 14:58:33 UTC
There is no way to put a non italic greek character in math. For example, nitalic %GAMMA gives the same result of %GAMMA
Created attachment 18850 [details] An example of issue 36535
The character which is inserted by %gamma is a spezial character out of the 'Private Use Area' of the font. It has typeface "standard" but the glyph looks like an italic typeface. Because the typeface is already "standard" a 'nitalic' attibute has no effect. You can use a greek character out of the "Basic Greek" subset of a normal font. But you have to insert it via clipboard, because the normal 'Special Character Dialog' is not available inside Math Command Window.
TL->IH: That's a font issue. As one can see by using %GAMMA nitalic %GAMMA gamma character displayed the character displayed by %GAMMA is the non italic one, the other is even much more slanted. The characters are exactly as they were in the old StarMath font. Even if the font was not italic those characters in there were. It's probably an error that should have been corrected. TL->rgb: To work around this you can simply redefine all the greek characters to use a different font with a correct character display. It needs to be done for each single character though.
IH: We did not change anything in the fonts so it should still work. I do not know what to do there now? Additional to that we have no possibility to change the StarSymbol font for StarOffice (we do not have the license to do this). I can change the OpenSymbol font, but I think it is not good if OpenSymbol and StarSymbol are different.
TL->IH: As discussed please put some comments about what is possible and what is not in here and then hand it over to User Experience.
IH->User Experience: The solution for this problem is to use a font that contains greek characters. We have those characters in the standard StarOffice fonts but not in OpenOffice's Bitstream fonts. Is it possible to include fonts with a wider unicode range into OpenOffice?
FL->Ilko: I have talked with Tom and he said that you have build the font. Could you please overtake this issue. Thank you!
IH->FL: Sorry, but you have not read my comments in this task. It is no solution for the problem if I change the OpenSymbol font, because we can not change the Symbol font for SO that is StarSymbol. Thomas Lange suggested to use the greek chars of on of the other fonts we ship with the product. This will easlily work with SO but not with OOo, because OOo's fonts do not have the greek chars. This is the reason why I ask marketing/user exp. for a solution here. You can also handle this over to Erwin T. if you think he is the right person for this task.
FL: Ups I thought that IH was Ingrid and not you :-). As discussed, the solution proposed by TL is to introduce a new font delivered with SO _and_ OOo. FL->LHO: Please decide if we want to introduce such a new font, containing the missing (style of) Greek characters.
Any news?
IH@FL: any new ideas here ?
DejaVu includes Greek
Also greek != math in unicode and the STIX project has made unicode.org add a lot of math-specific codepoints
In OOo3.3 two Greek symbol sets are available, one for regular characters and one for italic character.