A few questions

[Greg Titus]

On Monday, February 4, 2002, at 02:32  PM, Warren Nagourney wrote:

> Thanks very much for the suggestion, but I am afraid it didn't help. 
> Unless I need to login again after clicking in the Symbol box, nothing 
> changed - it still rejects my use of this font. For what it is worth, 
> there are a large number of other fonts (like Math1) which are also 
> rejected by the font panel.
>
> I don't quite understand why Symbol is an "international" preference; 
> but, then again, I don't understand why Apple took the very nice NeXT 
> font panel (with font preview) and changed it considerably for the 
> worse.
>
> Carbon apps don't seen to have this problem (they have others, though).
>
> Thanks again.

Hi Warren,

The reason why the International preferences enter into it is because 
there are two different issues involved here: fonts and input methods. A 
font determines how a particular character is displayed, while an input 
method determines how a particular keystroke or keystrokes is translated 
into a character.

What you need to do is enable the Symbol input method (which you did), 
and at that point (when you have more than one input method selected) a 
flag will appear to the right of the menus in the menu bar. When you 
want to enter symbols, switch the flag to the symbol input method, then 
switch it back to the U.S. flag to use the English input method.

What is really happening here is that all of the text entry in Graffle 
(and in all Cocoa apps and most Carbon apps) is using Unicode and the 
alpha character is _not_ the same as the "a" character in a different 
font.

When you switch to the Symbol font, and then type "a", if you are still 
in the U.S. English input method, OS X thinks that you are still 
intending to enter the character "a". The text layout machinery notices 
that there is no way to display an "a" in the Symbol font, so it 
switches fonts back to Helvetica (a font that does know how to display 
an "a").

The opposite happens when you switch to the Symbol input method. Then 
when you type the key labeled "a" on your keyboard, the Symbol input 
method knows that you really intend alpha. The text layout machinery 
notices that there is no way to display an alpha in Helvetica (or 
whatever your current font was), so it switches fonts to one that does 
contain an alpha character: the Symbol font.

It is fairly annoying for the specific example of Symbols (which could 
be solved if the Symbol font had a character for "a", even if it still 
_looked_ like an alpha), but this implementation does have huge 
advantages for entering text in multiple languages, and for having 
multiple input methods for a single language (traditional and simplified 
chinese input, for instance).

Quick answers to your other questions:
> One of the things I would like is to draw a circular arc and haven't 
> found any of doing so. I suppose I could enter an arc as a text item 
> (shapes.graffleshapes) using the existing ones as a guide. I thought 
> there might be a slightly easier way of doing this.

Nope, sorry. We've talked about having a "bend" tool for line segments 
and polygon edges, but nothing implemented yet.

> Are there any ways of setting global preferences for default behaviors? 
> For example, I usually don't use shadows on my shapes and would like to 
> avoid clicking on the box every time.

Yes. Open Preferences, click on "Drawing Tools", and select the box, or 
line, or whatever tool. Then modify it using the normal Info panes. 
(e.g. click on the shadow checkbox to remove the shadow). The icon for 
the drawing tool should change to reflect the lack of a shadow (or 
whatever other changes you make).

> I assume there is no way to cut a section of a shape out? In Vellum 
> there is a stiletto tool to do this; I think it is called "trimming".

No, but I'd be curious to hear more about this feature. How does it 
work? What do you use it for?

> The "rotate" tool is very fast and nice, but is there any way to set 
> the pivot point?

Nope, sorry.

Hope this helps,
	--Greg