no joy with fonts

[Friedrich F. Grohmann]

There have been recent discussions about cross platform font issues. My
problem is, at the moment, confined to the platform I'm working on, i.e. Mac
OS X.

I've built a number of stacks for my students, pretty simple stuff with at
least two text fields, one for Chinese, the other for Roman. No problems
with the Chinese text, but with the Roman strange things happened. The font
of the field was set to "Times Ext Roman". After I started typing in the
field, text which contains diacritical marks to indicate proper
pronunciation, and then re-checked the property inspector it turned out that
the font was now specified as "Times Ext Roman,Russian".

The logic behind that escapes me as I don't use any Cyrillic in the field.
Removing "Russian" resulted in garbled text and thus I simply kept it as the
text was at least properly displayed. This was on OS X.5.8.

Now I've moved to a newer machine with Lion installed and things turn out
ugly. The Chinese is still there untouched, the Roman shows thankfully
enough the needed diacritical marks but the font has changed. The weird
thing is that according to Text > Font, "Use Owner's Font" is checked which
simply doesn't reflect the actual state of affairs. I copied a chunk of text
from the field and pasted it into a word processor document (Nisus)
whereupon the text gets garbled. It is "Lucia Grande."

I've tried inserting openCard and preOpenStack handlers to force the field
to show "Times Ext Roman," but no way. Selecting the text and setting it to
the intended font makes it unreadable. Maybe this is just a Mac issue but
since I used to provide my students with standalones for Macintosh and
Windows I really wonder what could be done. Any suggestions most welcome.

Fritz