Quark Forums

We had a customer supplied job done in Quark 7 proofs come back for some corrections. When the document was reopened (still using the customer's supplied Helvetica 55 Roman fonts) all the greater than or lesser than equal signs disappeared. The plain greater than or lesser than signs not keyed with the option key remained fine. Since these characters weren't used in the new corrected areas, the problem wasn't detected until it went to the customer's proofreaders. Consequently we have a few questions that I need to answer without just saying "it's a font issue"... 1) What caused the change in the font appearance? 2) What can be done to prevent this problem in the future? 3) Is there a better way to have the customer create these symbols to avoid the same problem in the future?

This looks like a problem of using Type1 fonts in early Mac OS/X and later Mac OS/X

The characters 'greaterequal' and 'lessequal' were never part of the old Type1 font character set. The Mac System (the part of the QuickDraw text engine) would pull these characters into the font from the Symbol font, supplied as part of the system set. The first versions of Mac OS/X tried to recreate this but the latest version of Mac OS/X does not do this anymore.

You could try to see if the 'greaterequal' and 'lessequal' characters are part of the font by looking in the glyph window of Quark7. Some OpenType fonts will carry these characters, if they do not you should use the characters from the Symbol font.

Malcolm