"Glen Perkins" <Glen.Perkins@nativeguide.com>:
GP> Lucida Sans Unicode has pretty good coverage, but I'm not sure if it is
GP> included in any of Microsoft's freely-downloadable Language Packs
GP> (Pan-European, for example.)
I do not believe it is the case. You may want to check the last
version of Verdana (www.microsoft.com/truetype/) and see whether it
contains glyphs for the characters you need (I do know that Verdana
now covers the latin-based Vietnamese ortography, but I don't know
about Pinyin). Please not that you are not allowed to redistribute
these fonts with your application.
http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jec/programs/xfsft/mscorefonts.html
You may also have a look at the Junius Unicode font, at the bottom of
the page
http://www.engl.virginia.edu/OE/junicode/junicode.html
but the documentation only says
``Characters from Latin Extended-B and Additional needed to support
European languages''
which might not be enough for you.
There's also Michael Everson's font (available from his web site, I
don't have the address handy, search for ``Everson Gunn Theoranta''),
but I don't think it comes in TrueType format, and it is not free,
only shareware (Michael, I have dutifully erased my copy after
admiring your work).
Finally, Charles Bigelow (the designer of the Lucida family) is a very
helpful person, and I am sure that he'd be glad to offer you very
reasonable conditions if you wanted to license a Pinyin font from him.
I'll drop you his e-mail address if you're interested.
At worst, you could always cobble something together with bitmap
fonts. Markus Kuhn has compiled a very large set of glyphs for
Unicode in BDF format, and makes the resulting fonts freely available
(no strings attached, although I'm sure he'd appreciate an
aknowledgement). Free tools for reordering BDF fonts, as well as for
conversion of eight-bit BDF fonts to proprietary Microsoft formats are
available. You will find more information on Markus' page
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/
GP> I'd like to be able to use those code point ranges in my apps and
GP> point users to a URL whence they could download a very simple font
GP> installer if they didn't already have Lucida Sans Unicode, or some
GP> equivalent, on their machines.
Please inform me if you solve your problem.
Sincerely,
J.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:53 EDT