Re: *-ISO10646-1 fonts on Netscape, TCL/Tk, Java

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Jun 28 1999 - 08:05:07 EDT


Ricardo Bermell-Benet wrote on 1999-06-28 09:27 UTC:
> I have serious problems for using Markus Khun's 6x13 fixed
> unicode font with linux internet browsers.

Netscape cannot currently use a *-ISO10646-1 font directly. It builds
Unicode pseudo-fonts by merging available ISO 8859-* and JIS fonts
internally and ignores *-ISO10646-1 fonts in the process. This is of
course just a hack that provides access to only a tiny subset of the
characters found in a real Unicode font. Erik van der Poel
<erik@netscape.com> wrote me some time ago that fixing this in Mozilla
is already on his todo list.

It seems the Unicode support in TCL/Tk 8.1 might work similar to
Netscape and will also have to be fixed to allow to load a *-ISO10646-1
font directly. I have been in contact on this briefly with Brent Welch
<welch@scriptics.com> in the hope that exmh will be able to use UCS
fonts such as 6x13 directly soon for displaying/authoring UTF-8 email,
but this also seems not yet to be possible. I am not sure about the
latest status here.

The only X11 GUI applications that can use *-ISO10646-1 fonts directly
at the moment seem to be

  - XFree86 xterm (patch #108 or higher)
  - yudit
  - probably also some of the Plan9 tools
  - any UTF-8 capable text application inside xterm such as lynx or mined.

I hope this is going to change soon.

Does anyone know what the Java Virtual Machines are doing when
displaying Unicode characters? Do they also just use merged 8859 pseudo
fonts?

More information (please forward to the developer of your favourite
not yet Unicode enabled application) is on:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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