trouble with greek characters

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Sat, 07/27/2019 - 02:01 pm

hello,

for Axis Labels in IGOR 7, use of Symbol seems deprecated so we can just choose a Greek character, eg \nu, from the Special/Character menu. This appears just fine in the Axis Label: box, but in the Label Preview it appears as a "v", and remains so when closing out of the Modify Axis dialog. To get around this I've just been going back to the Symbol font, but then that little info box pops up about how the Special/Character menu is the way to go.

I'm using a Mac, almost-latest OS, and IGOR 7 (will update some day, I promise)...is this fixed in IGOR 8? is it somehow just a problem on my computer and works just fine for everyone else?

This happens for several fonts I've checked--Arial, Helvetica, Geneva. Oddly, Wingdings *does* produce a proper \nu.

(fwiw, I noted the discussion about enabling LaTeX support. omg that'd be awesome. I'm not a programmer otherwise I'd help, but happy to support those doing it)

Thank you--

The character that you are talking about is the lowercase Nu. The Unicode value is U+03BD.

I believe that the problem you are seeing is a limitation of the font. I get the same results in Igor7 and in TextEdit. I did not test it but I am pretty sure that Igor8 would behave the same.

Here are some fonts do not produce the desired character: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tahoma

Here are some fonts do produce the desired character: Courier New, Lucida Sans, Monaco, Palatino, Symbol, Times New Roman

It is OK to use Symbol font in Igor7 and later so long as you use the correct Unicode value. What is not OK is to expect Roman characters (e.g., A, B, C, a, b, c) to be translated into Greek characters as in Igor6. This translation is not supported in the Unicode world. Igor7 and later include some backward-compatible translation support but you should not rely on it. Instead use the proper Unicode character.

When you choose a character from the Character popup menu, Igor inserts the proper Unicode value, so it is OK to use Symbol font with such characters.

 

July 27, 2019 at 05:16 pm - Permalink