M & F SYMBOLS

[Eric Zurcher]

At 11:33 PM 2/26/96 +0200, Yuri Nekrutenko wrote:
>No problems with male and female symbols: they may be easily
>generated with the aid of a FONTOGRAPHER version for WORD.

This is true, though a problem remains: if you wish to give a copy of your
MS-Word document to someone else (e.g., a colleague, journal editor,
publisher, or reviewer), it is all to easy to forget that they will probably
NOT have your custom-made font (unless you provide them with a copy). When
viewed on their machine, your symbols will either disappear or be transmuted
into some entirely different character.

Until Microsoft provides "standard" fonts containing male and female
symbols, this will remain a problem. The Windows 3.1x distributions contain
no such font; I don't know about Windows 95. Windows NT does come with a
Unicode font which contains these symbols. This is the font "Lucida
Console", which has these characters within a subset called "Miscellaneous
Dingbats" -- one must wonder if this is some indication of the attitude of
Microsoft towards biologists generally!

Actually, with the eventual adoption of Unicode, the problem ought to
disappear. (Unicode is a new character set designed to replace and extend
8-bit ASCII with a 16-bit international set of characters. Microsoft is
promoting its use, but the transition will doubtless take a number of
years.) Does anyone know whether the 32-bit version of MS-Word can fully use
Unicode fonts? (The 16-bit version does not, so even though my NT system has
male and female symbols available, my copy of Word doesn't know how to use
them!)

Cheers,
Eric Zurcher
CSIRO Division of Entomology
Canberra, Australia
E-mail: ericz at ento.csiro.au