The Current Application Does Not Support This Unicode-Only Character

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Talk about failed promis­es: it’s near­ly 2005 and nei­ther the Mac­in­tosh ver­sions of Quark XPress nor Microsoft Word is up to the task of han­dling the basic typo­graph­i­cal needs of some­thing so sim­ple as a résumé. Grant­ed that on Win­dows I have to use sep­a­rate fonts to get char­ac­ters like small caps, lin­ing numer­als, or lig­a­tures, but since Adobe wants to sell Open­Type fonts, I don’t even have access to the fonts I was using on Win­dows as sep­a­rate fonts. Adobe wants us to do it the right way, with all the char­ac­ters togeth­er in one font. Apple wants us to do it that way, too, apparently.

So in the mean­time maybe I have to buy InDe­sign in order to get my résumé out? That’s not a good reflec­tion on Quark XPress.

I won­der if the new ver­sion of Word for OS X has bet­ter OpenType/Unicode sup­port. I’m not sure I want to spend mon­ey on that, either. If I had mon­ey to throw around for replac­ing soft­ware, I might not so be con­cerned about get­ting my résumé together.

Published by splicer

6 Replies to “The Current Application Does Not Support This Unicode-Only Character”

  1. I have Office for Mac 2004
    I have Office for Mac 2004 (with the entire suite) if that could be of any help? I’m not sure what the specifics of what you’re need­ing are but you’re more than wel­come to take a look at mine and see if it meets your needs…

  4. My Win­dows ver­sions of Word,
    My Win­dows ver­sions of Word, Quark­Ex­press, and Page­Mak­er all sup­port drop caps, small caps, kern­ing, etc. for all True­Type fonts. True lig­a­tures and lin­ing numer­als, of course, require an appro­pri­ate font. Per­haps you should find a Win­dows box (or pro­fes­sion­al help) if your resume requires that sort of typo­graph­ic analism. 

    Dad

    1. The way those pro­grams do
      The way those pro­grams do that is by scal­ing the cap­i­tal let­ters. You can see the weight isn’t con­sis­tent with those “arti­fi­cial­ly” made let­ter­forms. Small caps that actu­al­ly match (and don’t look lighter than the large caps) require anoth­er font, using the pre-Open­Type way of doing things, where they all get put in one font.

      The trou­ble occurs in Quark (on both Win­dows and Mac) is that it does­n’t address char­ac­ters in index­es high­er than 255. So you can have a nice font with all sorts of extras, but the pro­gram can’t see them.

      1. Obvi­ous­ly, scal­ing let­ters
        Obvi­ous­ly, scal­ing let­ters is the only way to do that with non-Uni­code fonts. WinXP, NT, and 2000 offer full Uni­code sup­port, but you need an appro­pri­ate font. Since Uni­code is a mov­ing tar­get, few fonts offer “full” sup­port. I don’t know much about Uni­code. Do they even offer a reserved band for dropped caps, small caps, etc? I have always just used anoth­er font if the scaled one did­n’t look right. The prob­lem is that there are so many free TT fonts out there that find­ing the one you want is dif­fi­cult. I think I under­stand why glob­al­ists want­ed Uni­code, but for most of us it is a huge waste of com­put­er resources for no return. Ari­al Uni­code is over 22MB, com­pared to nor­mal fonts of 20 – 100K. And by def­i­n­i­tion Uni­code dou­bles the size of every doc­u­ment. And for what? 

        That brings me back to the ear­li­er ques­tion: why does your resume need all that? And why don’t you sim­ply use a dif­fer­ent font? You won’t be able to use that resume on-line, or e‑mail it. Uni­code sup­port is usu­al­ly turned off in most browsers and nobody will be hap­py if you start imbed­ding 22MB fonts in your attachments.

        Employ­ers are more inter­est­ed in what’s in your resume. They don’t need a work of art.

        Dad

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