Symbol fonts Adobe oddness

[Phil_Welbourn@adobeforums.com]

Anyone able to explain this to me?

All non Adobe apps (Textedit, Finder, Quark 6 for example) produce correct keystrokes in the Postscript symbol font e.g. alt-y produces a multiplication symbol.

However, in any CS2 app, the character mappping has changed and no longer produces the correct characters. I can obviously select what I want from the glyph palette, but I cannot understand why the difference...

[Steve_Werner@adobeforums.com]

Here's a one-paragraph description of the problem from Sharon Zardetto Aker's great new book, Real World Mac OS X Fonts (Peachpit Press, page 158). She follows this paragraph with five pages of further explanation:

"The Zapf Dingbats and Symbol Nightmare

"Mac OS X ushered in major problems with two tried-and-true favorites: Zapf Dingbats and Symbol. Why? Because their characters, under Unicode, have IDs that aren't accessible from your standard keyboard: they are, in effect, foreign language characters that you can't type. Ironically, the confusionn has been compounded by the individual efforts of applications that either adhere strictly to the rules or try to help with the problem; all of which was made even worse by Adobe's somewhat misguided attempts to provide backward compatibility. Unfortunately, while I can describe the problem, I can't give you an easy solution."