Re: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 00:33:56 EST

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    My 2 piastres' worth:

    HTML was never intended to provide Web authors with 100% complete
    control over fonts. The end user was supposed to be able to choose her
    preferred font, typically one for "normal" text and another for
    <pre>monospaced text</pre>.

    Because of this, embedded-font mechanisms like WEFT will probably always
    be vendor-specific, not part of the (X)HTML family of standards.

    You can always "suggest" fonts using either CSS or the now-deprecated
    "font face" tag in HTML. All the pages on my site, for instance, use a
    CSS that contains the line:

    font-family: Georgia, serif

    which tells the browser to use Georgia if possible, and any old serifed
    font otherwise. (I have it on good faith that Georgia is widely
    available on both the Mac and Windows.)

    OTOH, in one case where I needed to insert a quick snippet of IPA and
    wanted to make sure it was rendered in a font that supported the IPA
    letters, I used the following:

    <font face="Lucida Sans Unicode, Verdana Ref, Arial Unicode MS, Gentium,
    Code2000">/juˈwelɪk/</font>

    (Go ahead, sue me for using "font face." I only claim conformance to
    XHTML 1.0 *Transitional*.)

    This does mean that the user has to acquire and install one of these
    fonts herself. The first three are only available with certain
    Microsoft products, but I know that Gentium and Code2000 are available
    on the Web. I don't remember the terms of use for Gentium, but Code2000
    costs a whopping $5. (Gee, I should probably pay James some time,
    shouldn't I?)

    If you really care about the fonts and layout of the text you
    distribute, well, that's what PDF is for. If you don't want to use PDF,
    but want to ensure that all your glyphs are displayed (possibly as a
    nominal "code chart" glyph only), one alternative might be to recommend
    the use of SC UniPad, a Unicode plain-text editor which can be
    downloaded from <http://www.unipad.org>. UniPad includes a glyph for
    every Unicode character except Plane 2, and if you are only using it as
    a viewer, it is free.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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