Weird Unicode Symbol Behavior on Sketchpad

SophieScharf

Hey everyone,

I encountered a weird problem when programming my most recent experiment which I am not sure is actually opensesame related but I thought I give it a shot - maybe you can redirect me.

I want to present equidistant plus ("+") and minus ("-") symbols in different positions each trial on a circle. For this purpose, I created text-variables, that are positioned equidistantly on a circle, that contain the plus- and minus-symbols as strings in a loop (see screenshot below).

Because plus- and minus-symbols are somewhat special I had some problems with presenting them in the middle of their allocated space, even though the variable names were perfectly centered on the circle. I found a solution for the plus symbol by using the unicode symbol fullwidth plus ("＋"). For some reason, however, I cannot change the presentation of the minus symbol, which is always shown a bit lower than the center of the text string (see screenshot below).

The presentation of the minus symbol doesn't change no matter what unicode symbol I try (normal minus, fullwidth minus, etc.) - even the unicode symbol fullwidth macron ("￣"), which should be on top of the text, is shown as in the screenshot.

Why does this work for the plus symbol but not the minus symbol? Is there something special about minus/hyphens? Is that a Unicode/HTML problem? Or is it a specific problem in OpenSesame?

Thank you very much for any input you might have!

Sophie

sebastiaan

Hi Sophie,

I'm not sure to be honest. To start, maybe you can present several different minus-like characters in a single string. Do they also appear identical then? If yes, then I suspect that the font simply doesn't contain these variations and falls back to a default minus-like character; in that case you can change the font and see if that works. If no, then let's look further.

Cheers!

Sebastiaan

SophieScharf

Hi Sebastiaan,

thanks to your tip I figured out that the issue is not the font or the unicode symbols, as they were presented perfectly when I present them in a single string. The issue was the alignment of the text that is based on the bounding box because there is/was no surrounding text for the minus symbol. The workaround from the manual for vertical alignment of text (https://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.2/manual/stimuli/text/#vertical-alignment) solved all my problems.

Thank you!

Sophie

sebastiaan

Good to hear! (PS. This alignment issue will be fixed in the next release of OpenSesame.)