futor@lll-lcc.aRpA (Randy J. Futor) (11/17/87)
In article <5640@jhunix.UUCP> ins_adgj@jhunix.UUCP (Donald G Jackson) writes: > > I have a question. I've started writing papers in french . . . > Ideally >I'd like to find some way of doing this without having to design a whole >new font since I doubt I have the proficiency needed to do this. > > Don Jackson -- The Johns Hopkins University -- ins_adgj@jhunix.UUCP Give Fontastic Plus a try before you say you lack the proficiency, sir! I got a copy soon after I bought my II & had a very pretty Cyrillic sans serif (which was *much* nicer to look at than the misnamed 'Russian' that comes with the program) run up inside an hour & a half. I had glanced at the first 6 or 7 pages of the manual. It didn't take me a whole lot longer to gen up a reasonable copy of Dr Tolkien's script which he attributes to the elf Feanor; the hardest part was starting over & over 'til I got all the way up to 18 point. By this time, though, I *had* read the rest of the manual! ;-} It's easier than you (ostensibly) think -- Randy futor@lll-lcc.arpa
joe@haddock.ISC.COM (Joe Chapman) (11/18/87)
Don, Forgive me if there's some reason you've already ruled this out (I missed your original article) but why can't you use existing fonts for writing in French? The only symbol you may have trouble with are the guillemets (quote marks) if you're using the mail-merge feature. If you simply want to rearrange your keyboard, there is a product called MacKeymeleon which allows you to rearrange your keyboard to suit the standard French layout or your whim or whatever. I haven't used this, as I generally don't purchase software with silly names, but I've heard good things about it from fussy-fingered colleagues. If you don't like the dead key approach to composing accented characters---this is essentially what the option-e-<character> sequence imitates---the fonts sold by Linguist's Software of South Hamilton, Mass. have diacritics which automatically backspace over the previous character. I found this to be great for typing in Greek, whether this is due to the funky accentuation rules in that language or the bizarre fast-lane feeling of about five levels of indirection between your brain and the screen I can't tell. -- Joe Chapman harvard!ima!joe