(Fonts in Greek) Trevor A

[Trevor A]

In Windows Affinity Publisher whenever I choose Times New Roman, the font name then displayed is Greekth and the letters displayed are from the Greek alphabet.  I can get round this by pasting in Times New Roman text from WORD, and in Publisher I can add underlining to the imported text or change the style to italics, but if I click on B for bold, the font and the displayed text immediately switch to Greekth.
See page 6 of the attached practice document.  I have tried to add bold to the title of the left-hand column in the table near the bottom of the page.
Your assistance in solving this problem will be appreciated.
Trevor

Practice_layout_02.afpub

[Pauls]

It sounds like you have font issues on your PC - you could try rebuilding the font cache by following this

You may also have some issues with font replacement in Publisher. Launch the app whilst holding down the control key and select 'Reset Font Replacements' only. Then select clear.

If either of those dont improve the situation we would need a zip of the contents of your font folder to investigate further

[Trevor A]

Hello Paul

Thank you for this.  I have tried launching the program while holding down the control key and selecting 'Reset Font Replacements' only, then clear, but that hasn't solved the problem.  I am nervous about rebuilding the font cache on my PC and may wait until a friend can come round to help me.

I will get back to you.

Trevor

[Pauls]

OK - it sounds like a font problem. Your file behaves much better for me

[Trevor A]

Thank you for the feedback.  I will investigate the fonts on the PC.

[Trevor A]

Hello Paul

Thank you for this.  I have tried launching the program while holding down the control key and selecting 'Reset Font Replacements' only, then clear, but that hasn't solved the problem.  I am nervous about rebuilding the font cache on my PC and may wait until a friend can come round to help me.

I will get back to you.

Trevor

[Trevor A]

Hello again Paul

I have looked at the link that you gave on rebuilding the font cache using this link: https://winaero.com/blog/rebuild-font-cache-windows-10/ and think that it is beyond my competence and may land me in greater problems.

Times New Roman works fine in Word and Excel, including when bold is added.  In Publisher, underlining doesn't change the font and italic goes to italic without changing the font.  Bold Italic also displays correctly.  It is only bold regular that does not.

The font in Windows lists four folders: Times New Roman Bold, Times New Roman Bold Italic, Times New Roman Italic and Times New Roman Regular.  I have opened all of these windows and all characters display correctly (except in Publisher & Photo!).  They also display correctly in Photoshop CS.  I have just tried in Affinity Photo and get exactly the same problem as in Publisher.  When I choose the font in the Publisher or Photo drop-down menu, I see "Times New Roman (4)", so it seems to be seeing all four versions of the font.

I attach a screen grab of the display of the TNR Bold file and a short afpub file just testing these four versions of Times New Roman.

I have just tried creating a test document with Affinity Publisher on the laptop, and virtually the same problem occurs.  It lets me select Times New Roman and displays it correctly (which I couldn't do on the desktop but now can in Publisher), but if I add Bold it switches to the Greekth font.  Of course, both computers have broadly the same programs on them, but it seems to me unlikely that the same files would be corrupted on both computers ...

Any further suggestions would be appreciated, as Times New Roman is the intended font for the main text in a book that I am preparing for publication.

Thank you once again.

Trevor

TimesNR_tests.afpub

[Trevor A]

Paul

I have made a zip file of my fonts folder, but it is 593.7 MB, which is larger than the limit that the forum specifies.  However, I can try to attach it if you think it will be accepted.

Trevor

[Pauls]

you can upload it here

[Trevor A]

Paul

Thank you.  I have uploaded it.

Trevor

 

Hello Paul

Thank you for this.  I have tried launching the program while holding down the control key and selecting 'Reset Font Replacements' only, then clear, but that hasn't solved the problem.  I am nervous about rebuilding the font cache on my PC and may wait until a friend can come round to help me.

I will get back to you.

Trevor

[Pauls]

Just installed your fonts and low and behold they are in greek. The Times new roman bold font and greekth seem to be getting mixed up. I dont know why but deleting greekth will enable the times new roman bold font to work.

[Trevor A]

Paul

Thank you!  I will of course try what you suggest.  However, I use most days at least one of several programs that require Greek fonts, so I will have to save Greekth somewhere safe and see if any of my other programs start having display problems!  If I find out more, I'll let you know!

Many thanks!

Trevor

 

 

Paul

Thank you.  I have uploaded it.

Trevor

 

Hello Paul

Thank you for this.  I have tried launching the program while holding down the control key and selecting 'Reset Font Replacements' only, then clear, but that hasn't solved the problem.  I am nervous about rebuilding the font cache on my PC and may wait until a friend can come round to help me.

I will get back to you.

Trevor

[kenmcd]

4 hours ago, Pauls said:

Just installed your fonts and low and behold they are in greek. The Times new roman bold font and greekth seem to be getting mixed up. I dont know why but deleting greekth will enable the times new roman bold font to work.

Apparently the Greekth font was created from the old open source MS Core fonts version of Times New Roman Bold.
When they did this they did not update all the name fields inside the font file.
So some of the fields still say Times New Roman which is causing the confusion.
This is what I found in one version ...
Unique Font Indentifier:  Monotype:Times New Roman Bold:Version 1 (Microsoft)
PostScript Name:  TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT

These errors will cause problems in the app and in the PDF output.

@Trevor A
If you would like, I can fix the version of the font you have so it works properly.
It is open source so you can attach it here.
I have found a couple different versions (both broken), but would also like to see the one you have.

 

[Trevor A]

Thank you.

I attach the font below.  I notice that in File Explorer it is identified as Greekth Bold.

Trevor

GREEKTH.TTF

[kenmcd]

@Trevor A

Attached is a modified version of the Greekth TrueType font.
Changed name to: Greekth OT   (for clarity and to avoid conflicts with original font)
Fixed all the name fields - no more conflicts with Times New Roman Bold.
Confusing to have a single weight identified as Bold, so made it Regular.
Saved it as an OpenType font, although the only feature it has is kerning.

GreekthOT-Regular.ttf

Should work fine now in APub, and other apps.
Let me know if you have any issues.

 

[Trevor A]

Hello

Thank you for your work on this.  I have downloaded it.

I have removed the original Greekth from the fonts directory, and this removes the Greek characters from my Times New Roman text in Publisher when I add bold, but … (see below)

I have installed the new version that you have kindly supplied, and with this installed, the Greekth font is not selected when I add bold to Times New Roman (English alphabet) text in Publisher.  If I select the font that you have provided, the characters do change to Greek, but that is how it should be, so the problem is solved (nearly!).

Now, when I select TNR English text in Publisher and click on B, I get Bold text in English characters that look like "English" Times New Roman.  However, if I look at the font name in the Publisher font window, I see “Greek trans”, which is another font that I have on my system.  The text looks right to me – so long as it still looks right to the printer who is to print the document!

So long as it looks right, I am happy.  However, something funny is happening, and I don't get the same problem with MS & Adobe programs.  It looks as though I have some “rogue fonts” on my system, perhaps prepared by someone who did not have adequate knowledge of how to make font files.

If I find that some other programs don’t display Greek characters correctly, perhaps because they are looking for a font called “Greekth”, I will try renaming your version to that, which should (?) solve the problem.  Of course, the original “Greekth” may be a font that is no longer used by the current version of any of the other programs that I use.  The problem is that some significant (large) programs that I use install their own fonts as part of the installation.  I don’t know if “Greekth” or “Greek trans” got onto my system that way.

Thank you once again for all the help and support.

Trevor

[kenmcd]

There could be a few different things happening.

Your font cache may be corrupted. You really need to flush it.

The Greek trans font may also be broken which is causing fonts cache corruption.
Attach that font here and I will take a look at it.

You cannot simply rename the Greekth OT font file to have a new name.
Multiple name fields within the font file need to be changed.

What applications are looking for the old font name?
It would be really odd to have a font name hard-coded (in most cases).

If some application is installing a bunch of broken fonts that is a big problem.
I have seen entire groups of old fonts which are broken.
In one case the Unique Font Identifier was the same in 10+ different fonts.

The problem is that the font creators often only test their one font on their one application.
If it works, they are done.
Then someone tries to use the fonts in more advanced applications which expect the fonts to be constructed properly.

You may be better off finding newer better fonts which do what you need.
For example if your Greek trans is the old font from SIL, they have much newer better Greek fonts.
See: https://software.sil.org/fonts/

 

 

[Trevor A]

Hello

Thank you for the further information and the helpful link to SIL, which is a respected name in Linguistics and non-English fonts.  They certainly have an impressive collection of fonts and I believe that I have downloaded from them in the past.

I regret that I don’t know how to flush out the font cache.  I will have to research that.

You can see from my suggestion of renaming the font that you supplied that I have no understanding of the technical side of how fonts function!

I also have the Microsoft Greek Polytonic keyboard and whatever fonts that automatically installs.  However, I wouldn’t expect any of them to cause problems.

I have opened the two programs that I regularly use that require Greek fonts, Biblesoft’s OneTouch and BibleWorks 10.  Both are still correctly displaying Greek text, so they may not be using either of the possibly problem fonts.

OneTouch is a mystery, as any Greek text from it pasted into Word displays garbage in a standard Latin Font.  This certainly seems to be a case as described by you, where the font creators only tested their font on their application.

BibleWorks is much more professional, as it shows in the program which fonts it is using, and enables a certain amount of choice of fonts.  Text exported from the program also displays absolutely correctly, including the less-common diacritics (now called “glyphs”, perhaps?).  Unfortunately, the man behind BibleWorks retired last year, and there is no longer any technical support for this program.

I will attach Greek trans

In spite of the defects of these “rogue fonts”, I note that their presence on the system does not cause any problems with Microsoft or Adobe programs, only with Affinity, so perhaps there is scope here for them to correct something.

Thank you once again!

Trevor

GKTRANS.TTF

[kenmcd]

@Trevor A

The Greek Trans font has the same issue as the Greekth font.
Unique Font Indentifier:  Monotype:Times New Roman Bold:Version 1 (Microsoft)
PostScript Name:  TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT

As you would surmise, the Unique Font Identifier field should be unique.
Right now you have at least three fonts with this "unique" identifier.
The PostScript Name is also required to be unique (otherwise wrong fonts display in the PDF output).
I am concerned that there may be more non-unique fonts.
If Greek Trans is the last font with this issue, disabling it should eliminate the issue.
If it does, then I can fix that font and we should be good.
Otherwise, if there are more non-unique fonts, we are going in circles.

 

On 12/22/2019 at 12:46 AM, Trevor A said:

OneTouch is a mystery, as any Greek text from it pasted into Word displays garbage in a standard Latin Font.  This certainly seems to be a case as described by you, where the font creators only tested their font on their application.

This happens when pasting text copied from an old non-Unicode font into a modern Unicode font/application.
The character codes do not match-up and you get garbage.
That may be what is happening here.
There was another user here in this forum with a similar issue and using OCR was the solution in that case.

OneTouch apparently uses two fonts named - PCSB GREEK and PCSB HEBREW
So look for those files in your Fonts folder.
I can take a look at them to see what encoding is used if you are interested.

I did notice that while the Greekth and Greek Trans fonts do have Unicode encoding,
at least in the Greekth font, the characters are not in the standard Unicode codes.
Greekth has all the Greek characters in A-Z, and a-z code points.
I guess that is to get around having to have a special keyboard.

I did see some old MS tech support posts that mention a lack of support for the Microsoft Greek Polytonic keyboard in W10.
Has this been fixed?

Some Windows 10 fonts which do support Polytonic Greek - Palatino Linotype, Tahoma, also appears Arial, Calibri may work.
Open source fonts - Cardo, Carlito, Galatia, Gentium, etc ...
These should all work just fine in APub.

So you are dealing with some bad fonts, and perhaps some encoding issues.
Using newer fonts may solve all your issues in APub.

 

[Trevor A]

Hello

Thank you for the further help and explanations.  When I remove Greek Trans from the Fonts directory, the problem with Affinity Publisher goes away.  i.e., the font name when I had chosen Times New Roman remains Times New Roman in the font name display box, even when I add bold.  When I deleted it from the fonts directory the name “Greek transliteration” was displayed as the font name.  (I have copied it to another directory, in case it is needed.

I have just opened OneTouch PC Study Bible and selected text in Greek, and it has displayed correctly, so at least that part of the program does not use the font Greek trans.  I have the following PCSB fonts in my fonts directory:
PCSB Greek Outline Regular, PCSB Greek Regular, PCSB Hebrew Outline Regular, PCSB Hebrew Regular and PCSBTransliterated Regular.
If other Greek or Hebrew fonts were installed by the program, the font names don’t begin with the letters PCSB.

Greek text in BibleWorks is still displaying correctly, so it doesn’t seem to use Greek trans.  I have many fonts on my system that begin with the letters Bw, and these are presumably BibleWorks fonts.  Every time I have exported Greek text from BibleWorks to WORD (which I have done frequently over many years), it has displayed correctly.  On the rare times that I have exported Hebrew text, it has displayed correctly.  BW also has Coptic and Cyrillic fonts, which I have not had occasion to use.

I had a Spanish-language book on New Testament Greek published this year and I prepared the text in WORD, included short Greek texts pasted from BW and also used other Greek fonts (although neither of the two fonts that are causing problems in Publisher).  I let my publishers (a major academic publishing house in Spain and the USA) prepare my manuscript for print, and even though I instructed them to use the Greek fonts that I had used, they changed the fonts, which resulted in some display problems (consistently-appearing errors), all of which I hope that I caught at the proof-reading stage.  I now have printed copies of the book, and haven’t spotted display problems yet, so perhaps they corrected all of them.

For my next book, which I am preparing myself in Publisher, I hadn’t intended any Greek characters to appear!

Microsoft Greek Polytonic keyboard in W10.
I downloaded this from Microsoft on 22.9.16.  In October 2018 I had a total computer crash and re-built everything from scratch, including re-installing their Greek Polytonic keyboard.  I am now using W10 and was in 2018 when I had the crash.  I was probably already using W10 in 2016, if it was available.  Documents using this keyboard written in September 2016 in WORD still display correctly today, although I have not checked all combinations of accents, breathings and iota subscript.

I already have Galatia SIL Regular on my system, although not the other fonts that you mention.  Thank you for the information.  On Greek text from BW I have been able to change the font to Calibri and Times New Roman and still get correct Greek display and print-out.

If fixing Greek trans is not a big job, I would be grateful if you could do it.

I will try to attach the PCSB fonts, if possible.

Many thanks!

Trevor

PCSBGrk.ttf

PCSBGrkO.ttf

PCSBHeb.ttf

PCSBHebO.ttf

PCSBTranslit.TTF

[kenmcd]

On 12/24/2019 at 1:40 AM, Trevor A said:

If fixing Greek trans is not a big job, I would be grateful if you could do it.

GreekTransOT-Regular.ttf

Let me know if you have any issues with it.
Good luck.

[Trevor A]

Hello

Thank you once again for this.  I have downloaded this font and installed it in the Fonts directory.  Opening the Affinity Publisher Practice Layout document with which the original version of this font was chosen whenever I added Bold to Times New Roman text, the problem no longer exists.  Now I have the confidence that if I create in Publisher the document that is to be published, this problem will not occur.

Thank you very much!

Trevor