Using Symbol Font in Pages/Keynote etc.

Question

Here is a strange problem: Whenever I want to insert a greek character from Symbol font Pages (09 as well as 08, and Keynote ...) replaces it by some standard font (probably Helvetica). In effect, Symbol is not available. If I want to write a simple formula containig a greek character (as e.g a small beta) I have to use Mathtype or copy and paste from word. Good old Appleworks also works fine with Symbol font.
Can anybody help?? What am I doing wrong???

Answer 1

Using the character pallette or activating the greek keyboard will of course do. It seems an awkwardly labourious way to me, though. If I understand you correctly there is no other way. Why would symbol font (which is not greek but symbol!) not work in the same way as e.g. Wingdings (Zapf Dingbats behaves just as symbol, though)? I Don't care for Unicode, but this, I think, is unfortunate.
It is the other way around - the way monotonic Greek and mathematics are drawn in Adobe PostScript is a disaster -:). It helps to read Inside Macintosh: Text, published in 1993, and the PostScript Language Reference Manual, first and second version.
How was monotonic Greek and mathematics drawn on the Apple LaserWriter in 1985? Well, it was drawn by depicting the glyphs for monotonic Greek and mathematics in the built-in Adobe Symbol font program dictionary onto Apple Roman.
Adobe PostScript provides two procedures to get from characters to glyphs, StandardEncoding and FontSpecific encoding. The latter encoding vector is used when the Adobe PostScript configurable name space that replaces a character set is used to overrule the operating system character set.
If you were typing monotonic Greek because you wanted to type Greek, and not because you wanted to type mathematics, you were in the ditch with this hack since the hack broke spelling, sorting and searching which are processes that are predicted on character codes.
Apple Royal, now Apple Advanced Typography, was a project that took two directions to address the problem of drawing to the display and the printer.
First, the CMAP Character Map was intended to include the characters for the writing systems of world scripts.
Second, the layout logic to map from characters to glyphs was intended to provide evaluatable appearances for stylistic alternates such as small capitals, superscripts, subscripts and ligatures.
Adobe PostScript is a one-to-one mapping model that by definition is incapable of protecting the source character string when drawing fine typography.
You may rest assured that the issue of interactive input methods is on the agenda for computer manufacturers. For instance, Microsoft failed in a bid to acquire Swiss keyboard maker Logitech in 2008.
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