Asian fonts display in font book but show as Western fonts in apps!

Question

Adobe apps still display Asian fonts as Western characters, even though I've changed language settings via the "international" control panel of System Preferences. Perhaps I have not done this correctly? I've restarted the machine after changes to Systems language prefs. Asian and other calligraphic fonts are all installed and display fine in Font Book. Is there a fix?

Answer 1

As my aim is to access character sets without the
need to change the language settings on my machine
That's exactly what Character Palette does.
think the ideal solution is to get a copy of
Fontographer and copy all the decorative fonts and
save them as standard fonts.
A total waste of time in my view.
True Futhark has several
characters that stand for phonetics not compatible
with plain roman alpha/qwerty keyboard use. I
understand the same is true of other fonts-there are
bound to be discrepancies.
Most of the characters in the world are not compatible with qwerty keyboard use. That's why in general people don't use that method to produce them, or try to jigger fonts so they might be able to.
Perhaps this is why so
many characters come up as "?" even when inserted
via the Finder's character palette?
This may be because your app is set to Latin-1 or some other limited encoding. It should be set to UTF-8. Try Character Palette with TextEdit and you will not get any ?'s.
Control+T does nothing in Adobe apps, as far as I can
see. Apple+T brings up the Type palette but there is
no "insert special character" option there.
I got that wrong. The combo for Apple apps is Option + Apple + T. I don't know if that works in Adobe (don't use them myself).
I did notice a wonderful
Tibetan font that must be on my machine somewhere,
though it does not show up in Font Book under "All
Fonts"!
These are part of the ST series of Chinese fonts. If you go to the Tibetan range in Character Palette you can see this and you can also input them in TextEdit or a UTF-8 doc. Or you can examine the contents of an ST font by putting Character Palette in glyph mode.
I guess ideally, for graphics use, one should get the
characters into a standard font file, as I suggest
above, and then type away merrily qwerty-style.
Some Asian scripts have thousands of characters. Using a qwerty keyboard to try to access a few of them from a recoded font is not something that anyone does as far as I know. They use a specialized Input Method or the Character Palette or a similar utility. Also unless you are truly transforming your output into graphics/photos, your input would be seen as qwerty on other machines.
suppose these decorative fonts are available on the
web somewhere, where those who sell them have gone to
the trouble of transcribing the characters in to an
'ordinary' font for you?
Never seen such things myself.
It seems a shame that Macs OSX can't grant you access
to all these decorative fonts (indeed, to all
installed fonts) in a more straight forward manner.
The Character Palette is the most straightforward manner possible for accessing such scripts, if you do not want to switch keyboard layouts. All computer system use a similar mechanism. It even has a Favorites section where you can store characters you want to use frequently so you can avoiding looking them up each time. If you have some specific problems using it, I'd be glad to help, here or by email (click on my name for the address).
Am I correct in these assumptions?
No, I think all of them are wrong myself.