On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> I am using Netscape Communicator Version 4.06 [en] - 98225 under Linux 2.0
> and XFree86 3.2.
>
> I am looking at the UTF-8 test page
>
> http://www.macchiato.com/mark/unicode/UTF8List.htm
It's a bit amusing to note that there was no response when I made a
similar page (with more characters but with less details on each
character) at
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jshin/faq/utf8_unicode2.0.html
> I have correctly installed the Unicode font
>
> -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1
>
> as available from
>
> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz
>
> on my X server, but Communicator does not allow me to select this font
> (which has a much larger repertoire than the quite built-in
> "NSPseudoFonts" that Communicator offers me only as fonts for UTF-8).
Well, how wide range of characters can be covered by 'NSPseudoFonts'
depends on how many sets of X11 fonts you have installed on your Linux
box and how many encodings a version of Mozilla/Netscape you use
supports. 'NSPseudoFonts', as its name implies, is NOT a real font but
a set of X11 fonts(available in encodings supported by a version of
Mozilla) dynamically collected and presented to Mozilla as a Unicode
font(thus, it's *Pseudo* font). Thus, 'built-in' is far from
a correct word to describe 'NSPseudoFonts'.
> Does anyone here know, how I can bring Communicator 4.06 to use a proper
> normal X11 ISO 10646-1 font offered by the X11 server for displaying
> UTF-8 files, instead of these strange builtin fonts? Or is it a bug that
> Netscape Communicator does not offer me the *-iso10646-1 fonts offered
> by the server in the UTF-8 font menu?
There's no way you can do that with Netscape up to 4.5. It's not a
bug, either.
This point has been raised by me(in this very list) back in March when
open source Mozilla development was about to begin. Mozilla does NOT
make use of "-iso10646-1' (or any other unicode font with whatever XLFD
name). I tried to add this feature to open source Mozila (partly because
Koreans have a very compelling need to transit to Unicode as soon as
possible for the sake of much better representation of Korean writting
script) but gave up after a while. X11 font selection mechanism is too
complex(and my programming skill is too bad) as Erik at netscape has
admitted before. There was a pretty long thread on this issue in
news://news.mozila.org/netscape.public.mozilla.wishlist. You may wish
to read the thread using Dejanews at
http://x7.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?search=thread&svcclass=dnserv
er&threaded=1&ST=PS&CONTEXT=913398584.729808896&HIT_CONTEXT=913
398584.729808896&HIT_NUM=67&recnum=%3c6fvujd$a472@secnews.netsc
ape.com%3e%231/1
Present NSPseudoFont mechanism is not so bad although there's
certainly a need to make Mozilla directly make use of Unicode X11 font.
However, that's not so simple as it sounds. Nonetheless, if someone
with enough expertise could implement this, it'd be great.
Jungshik Shin
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