GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 557483
Bullet characters are not valid in most fonts
Last modified: 2017-07-31 12:48:30 UTC
Other than the "Bullet" character • (Unicode 2022) which is being used as the first level bullet ... the characters used for bullet points do not exist in most fonts. Suggestions: 1) do what Microsoft does: switch fonts on the bullets and use characters from System or Wingding. OR 2) use a different character: Some ideas: level 2: the letter o (that's what outlook does?) or Middot · (unicode 00b7) level 3: lozenge ◊ (Unicode 25CA) Other options which are present in nearly all fonts on my system, including Bitstream's fonts, are the Single › (Unicode 203A) and Double » (Unicode 00BB) right-pointing angle quotation marks, the "dagger" † (Unicode 2020), and the bullet operator ∙ (Unicode 2219) which looks just like MidDot in most fonts.
This is also an issue on Mac. I'd really like to just have the same bullet characters on all platforms, so if we can find something that works everywhere that would be great. But that just might not be possible.
Meanwhile: any suggestions as a workaround? which fonts are Tomboy-Bullet-Proof on Windows?
*** Bug 606425 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Works correctly with Arial Unicode MS, DejaVu Serif, DejaVu Sans, and Lucida Sans Unicode, but not all Unicode fonts. Some fonts display the same bullet at each level and, if it's simple to implement, you could make this a flag option. An alternative would be to provide fields for users to specify Unicodes for levels 2 and 3 (or 1, 2 and 3). You could say users should select a suitable Unicode font so there is no need for a solution at all. However I particularly like Georgia for its legibility and a way of suppressing the four-digit boxes at levels 2 and 3 would be convenient and helpful. If there is a way of making composite Unicode fonts, e.g. Georgia with blocks imported from DejaVu, you would have a universal solution!
Other free fonts that work are Linux Libertine and Segoe UI. Following on from Joel's earlier suggestion (2008-10-22) and mine (2010-08-08), I'd opt for • (Unicode 2022) for level 1 with - (dash) for level 2, and middot · (unicode 00b7) for level 3 • Level 1 - Level 2 · Level 3 To my eye this reduces the visual impact of the bullet character at each level making the text easier to follow and read.
Please excuse the one man campaign here but there is more to bullets than I thought. As a result allowing users to enter the Unicode numbers for their choice of bullet characters now appears to me as the best and universal solution. You could also provide default bullet characters for suitable Unicode fonts as now, and a standard alternative for other fonts, e.g. • (bullet, Unicode 2022), - (hyphen, Unicode 002d), · (middot/midpoint, Unicode 00b7), as my previous suggestion (but would this be suitable for non-English use?). There do not seem to be any agreed conventions for bullets among typographers. Robert Bringhurst says in his excellent The Elements of Typographic Style that the midpoint is an ancient European mark of punctuation widely used to flag items in a vertical list. The Oxford Manual of Style suggests a solid circle, square or triangle. Unicode includes many bullet characters and others that can be used as bullets. Allowing people to make the own choices is the obvious answer.
A final comment in case changing the character codes, or providing an alternative to the existing set of bullets, is the most practical solution. As Joel indicates almost all Latin fonts provide bullet • (Unicode 2022), middot · (unicode 00b7), hyphen - (Unicode 002D), single right pointing angle quotation mark › (Unicode 203A), and dagger † (Unicode 2020). The lozenge ◊ (Unicode 25CA) is also common but missing from some fonts.
Thanks for all the work, Ian, it's much appreciated. The current state on Windows is regarding this symbols is really sad, we should improve this asap.
*** Bug 631972 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
How does Tomboy support level 1,2,3 indents under Ubuntu for example? Selecting the Ubuntu font for example, works perfectly under Ubuntu (and any other Linux-based variants). Copying said font and installing it on a Windows7 machine does NOT produce the expected results. Levels 2 and 3 are still missing - I like Mahjongg, just not on my notes.
The Tomboy team has moved from GNOME Bugzilla to GitHub for bug reports and feature requests: https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy/issues/ Closing this report as NOTGNOME as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping (bug 781054) to keep tasks in one place. Please feel free to transfer this task to GitHub if this task is still valid in a recent Tomboy version. We are sorry for the inconvenience.