Italics

[Andrea Sedlak]

I've been using Reunion for years, through a number of its versions. In my miscellaneous notes, I write stories about the lives of the individuals, often inserting direct quotations from them, which I've put into italics. I've always used Lucinda Grande font. Recent versions of Reunion have been telling me that Lucinda Grande font does not support italics. So I can't format the notes with it and the notes I do have do not display it. HOWEVER, the oddity of it all is that the notes that I entered in earlier versions of Reunion, where I did use italics, produce the italics correctly when I generate a book. The text doesn't appear in italics in the notes fields in the records, but when it is placed into a book, it does!!! How am I going to reconcile the formatting with my edits and new entries?

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: italics

I've been using Reunion for years, through a number of its versions. In my miscellaneous notes, I write stories about the lives of the individuals, often inserting direct quotations from them, which I've put into italics. I've always used Lucinda Grande font. Recent versions of Reunion have been telling me that Lucinda Grande font does not support italics. So I can't format the notes with it and the notes I do have do not display it. HOWEVER, the oddity of it all is that the notes that I entered in earlier versions of Reunion, where I did use italics, produce the italics correctly when I generate a book. The text doesn't appear in italics in the notes fields in the records, but when it is placed into a book, it does!!! How am I going to reconcile the formatting with my edits and new entries?

The Lucida Grande (no "n" in Lucida) font that comes with OS X has no italics. There is a version of the font, developed by Bigelow & Holmes, that does have the italic style. But it probably isn't on your Mac.

Because OS X uses Lucida Grande as a system font, and it has no need for italics, Apple didn't licence an italic style.

So, you can either obtain the italic style from another source (e.g. Bigelow & Holmes) or change fonts within Reunion to a font that includes italics.

Anywhere you're seeing italics when you copy or use text elsewhere is probably in a different font.

I've used a different font everywhere in Reunion that Lucida Grande was the default. It's the easiest and cheapest solution. But if you insist on Lucida Grande you can read about the versions available at this page and get the italics at this page. But I haven't tried this myself.

[Andrea Sedlak]

Re: italics

Thank you, Dennis! Your reply has really helped me. I just had to poke around in the various preference locations to figure out how to specify the font for the miscellaneous notes, which I've now successfully done. I think I can live with Arial. The strange thing was that somehow the Reunion database knew that I had specified italics for certain text in much earlier versions and kept that information when it transformed the display or the report into another text. I was just prevented from specifying the italics in the more recent Reunion versions because of the Lucida Grande restriction.

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: italics

Thank you, Dennis! Your reply has really helped me. I just had to poke around in the various preference locations to figure out how to specify the font for the miscellaneous notes, which I've now successfully done. I think I can live with Arial. The strange thing was that somehow the Reunion database knew that I had specified italics for certain text in much earlier versions and kept that information when it transformed the display or the report into another text. I was just prevented from specifying the italics in the more recent Reunion versions because of the Lucida Grande restriction.

Glad you found a solution that works for you!

[Bob White]

Re: Italics

Andrea: I'm not sure just how accurate this is but here goes! Code for all of the formatting specified in a paragraph is "attached" to the end of line code that you see displayed as a paragraph mark. The coding for items such as italics is included in that attached code.

Put that together with the Mac OS's ability to substitute fonts quite accurately and you have the explanation for the italics reappearing when a different font is used. e.g. The code stayed in place but the Mac system version of Lucida Grande was unable to interpret/display it.

To anyone who knows lots more about word layout and fonts... feel free to jump in and correct me if I'm laboring under false pretenses. It would only mean that those who taught me were also in that boat.

[PollyK]

Re: Italics

I've changed my font to another so I can use Italics, but I cannot see how to change it for Free Form sources. What am I missing?

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Italics

I've changed my font to another so I can use Italics, but I cannot see how to change it for Free Form sources. What am I missing?

The manual says, "the font applied to free-form text is specified in the General Preferences."

So I think probably "Preferences" --> "General Preferences" --> "Font for lists and data entry" is what you want.