Re: Last Resort Font

From: Owen Taylor (otaylor@redhat.com)
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 16:24:30 EDT

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    On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 15:45, Michael Everson wrote:
    > At 15:04 -0400 2003-08-19, James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
    > > >>>>> "John" == John Jenkins <jenkins@apple.com> writes:
    > >
    > >John> (Apple's LastResort font [contains every Unicode character],
    > >John> of course, but by virtually of rampant reuse of glyphs.)
    > >
    > >Does this Generate glyphs like the following ascii- & utf8-art?
    >
    > No. It generates much much better glyphs than that. See
    > http://developer.apple.com/fonts/LastResortFont/

    Of course, "better" here really depends on what you want.
    Prettier? Yes. More useful for Joe User who gets Sinhala
    spam? Yes. More useful if you are trying to debug why, in
    a span of Arabic text, some characters aren't being located
    in a font? Not really.

    > >I find it interesting, if so, that Apple uses a font to acheive that
    > >rather than a bit of code in the rendering libs.
    >
    > What Mac OS X does is when it encounters a Unicode character, it sees
    > if it's in the current font. If it's not, it starts looking through
    > all the other fonts until it finds one that is suitable. The Last
    > Resort Font has glyphs for all the characters, so it's the last one
    > looked at.

    If you have a Last Resort style font, Pango should pick it up
    as well (*). The hex boxes are only drawn when *no* font
    on the system contains the character.

    Regards,
                                            Owen

    (*) With some caveats about fontconfig configuration that I'm
        not going to get into here.



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