[ueb-ed] Keep a close eye on what fonts you use in Word.
- From: George Bell <george@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ueb-ed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <ueb-ed@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2014 09:37:25 +0000
I thought it worth attempting to explain something which could possibly happen
to you. Sorry if this is lengthy, but hopefully will explain just how hard it
can be to get a message across.
I was checking out the list which appears in the UEB “Guidelines for Technical
Material” in Section “10 Set Theory, Group Theory and Logic.”
The first two items on the second table show a “normal subgroup” and the
“inverse…”
I was testing out converting text to a table, which is usually a better way to
handle material which has varying numbers of tabs between fields in each row.
You then simply hide the table borders on Word, and all appears as per the
original, but imports way better into braille, etc..
However, when I translated, it appeared that it was the braille software which
was at fault. So after checking, checking and checking again, (always the
golden rule in such cases) I reported this to the software developer. “No
problem here” was the gist of the reply.
However, the programmer is blind, but is a math PhD, so I’m not really in a
very strong position to argue. I was assured the Unicode values U+22B3 and
U+22B2 were being translated correctly.
Finally, I put together some special screen shots showing Word, a modified
pre-translation in the braille software which clearly showed the characters had
been swapped by the software, and the resulting braille.
Obviously the screen shots were no use to the programmer, so I suggested she
get sighted help in situ, to explain what I was seeing. I finally got talking
to the sighted help, who thankfully is also a programmer. Here’s what we
worryingly, and unexpectedly, found.
My table had, for some unknown reason used a font called “Lucida Sans Unicode”
– a normally installed Windows Font. So to me, visually, I was correct as
shown here:
(I hope the HTML e-mail doesn’t change what follows on the next two lines and
keeps it as it left here.)
22B3 ⊳
22B2 ⊲
But when we changed the font to “Arial Unicode MS” – note how the signs
themselves have changed visually.
22B3 ⊳
22B2 ⊲
Needless to say, once the Arial font at my end had been applied, the braille
was correct.
I shall let you all ponder this one, but suffice to say, I’d have been really
upset if a student only just failed an exam because of such an error.
George.
PS: If you don’t already know, you can enter a Unicode character in Word by
typing in the Unicode value, e.g. 22B3 then immediately hold down the Left Alt
key and tap the letter x.
To find out the Unicode value of a character you see in Word, use the same
keystroke as above.
This is what’s called a “toggle command”, to repeating the keystroke will allow
you to alternate between Unicode and character view.
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