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Re: cursive and symbol fonts




In regards to the Carl's first question, I have long used a TT-font
called BurshScript which is from SoftKey and was distributed as part of
the font set in an "Extras folder" with some of our Macs. Since then, I
received on a PowerMac clone from Motorola a similar TT-font called
BrushScriptMT. I simply don't know if either font is really "free" or not
--- but they were distributed on the hard disk of Macs or Mac clones.

On Wed, 29 Apr 1998, Carl E. Mungan wrote:
Is there a standard font (i.e., preferably TrueType, free, and commonly
available for both Windows and Mac) used to make curly letters (usually
capitals), such as the symbol E for emf, an arbitrary linear operator L,
the Hamiltonian H, and countless other similar examples?

On the second question, I believe that the proper epsilon should be the
one that looks a little like a lower case 'c' with a hyphen at its center
or like "one semicircle with a horizontal bisector" (as opposed to the
script version that looks like a script e or like "two semicircles (like
one lowercase 'c' stacked on top of another)". The first one produces
little, if any, confusion in students (or at least no more than they would
already have). The second seems to be commonly confused with the "emf"
symbol. One can always say (as some texts mistakenly do) that they should
understand what the meaning is from the context. But haven't we all seen
enough students cancel the upper-case 'N' for newtons with the 'N'
sometimes used for Normal force that we use more commonly FsubN in our
class rooms to avoid just such confusion?
Symbol font does have what I would call a "proper" epsilon which is
ASCII-206decimal and obtained by striking Opt-Shift-q(MAC). (The "other
one" is ASCII-101decimal, lower-case 'e'.) I believe that Opt-Shift-q on
MAC is replaced by Alt-Shift-q on WIN (but I am not really sure).
All of the above are available for both WIN and MAC, or can be
converted from MAC to WIN (or WIN to MAC) through a beautiful piece of
share-ware ($20) called FontClerk (v5.0 is the version I have) from Robert
Chancellor, 963 Cedar St. El Segundo, CA 90245. There many other "font
converters" available all of which seem to do the job --- this one is just
the best I've seen and works so well that I've stopped looking.

BTW1: Years ago I used the standard Mac-DA called KeyCaps and the capture
feature to produce a graphical template for a K/B which I then pasted into
the "Draw mode" (not "Paint mode") of my favorite graphics program
(SuperPaint). I then made copies of the K/B template (one each for
upper-case, lower-case, Opt-UC, & Opt-LC) and "filled"/over-typed each key
position with the appropriate letter. Now when I want to make a listing
of all of the characters in a font to give to colleagues, I just go to
that graphics document, do a global font change, and print out a full copy
of the font.

And while I'm on the topic of fonts, I would like to know once and for all
whether the the Greek letter epsilon as used for dielectric constant should
be written with two semicircles (like one lowercase "c" stacked on top of
another) or as one semicircle with a horizontal bisector (like a lowercase
"e" whose front edge has been shaved off)? (Please excuse my humble
descriptions.) Usually in books I see it as the latter. But why does the
standard TrueType symbol font on my Mac choose the former? Can I change
this?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Carl Mungan, Assistant Professor http://www.uwf.edu/~cmungan/
Dept. of Physics, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL 32514-5751
office: 850-474-2645 (secretary -2267, FAX -3161) email: cmungan@uwf.edu

BTW2: Carl, please say hello to Dick Smith for me.

ERTEL SENDS.
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