RE: Representative glyphs for combining kannada signs

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Fri Mar 17 2006 - 20:19:43 CST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "Re: Representative glyphs for combining kannada signs"

    > From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
     
    > But I still have problems with UCAS in Internet Explorer only, and
    with a few scripts
    > for which it is impossible to select the appropriate OpenType font
    despite it is installed
    > (and working in Notepad, Word, and Firefox): Myanmar, Oriya.
     
    You are now talking about something different from what you were saying
    earlier. The script behaviour problem you mentioned was
     
    "You'll see that "some" browsers still do not correctly handle the
    needed reordering of vowels before display..."
     
    This was explicitly in relation to Indic scripts. And the software you
    cited included:
     
    "... Internet Explorer (IE6 or even in latest beta of IE7 on Windows XP
    with the latest patches installed, and with Office 2003 installed with
    additional fonts and most up-to-date Uniscribe engine). And if you
    copy/paste it from Internet Explorer to MS Office Word or Excel
    documents, where Uniscribe is used, things don't go really better..."
     
    Re-ordering of Indic vowels most certainly does work on the Indic
    scripts that are supported on XP (which is most of them).
     
    Last time I checked, UCAS doesn't have any re-ordering vowels. :-)
    Myanmar and Oriya were not supported on XP.
     
     
    > And non properly working Indian scripts include:
    > * Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam (left matras displayed on the right),
     
    Bengali and Malayalam are supported in XP SP2, and the left matras
    display on the left.
     
     
    > * Telugu (minor: only one matra is subjoined, others are not subjoined
    or upper
    > joined but always displayed after the consonnant)
     
    We display Telugu vowels where they belong in relation to the typeface.
    Some attach above, some go below and some go lower right.
     
     
     
     
    > I am still experimenting with Lao, and I'm still not sure that Tibetan
    is correct with the
    > Tibetan font I have installed.
     
    Lao and Tibetan are not supported scripts on XP. Lao, Tibetan, Khmer,
    Oriya, Sinhala, UCAS - all these will be supported on Vista.
     
     
    > The purpose of these tests is to set a configuration guide
    > for users, and to detect documents whichare not properly encoded and
    use various
    > tweaks when trying to work around common rendering bugs.
     
    Keep in mind an important difference between bugs and unsupported
    functionality. It is explicitly not a requirement of conformance to
    Unicode that software needs to be able to correctly display or interpret
    characters from this or that script. If a particular product does not
    support Oriya script, it is not a bug; it is simply not a feature of
    that product. Nine years ago, there were barely any (if any at all)
    applications that could display Unicode-encoded text. Things have come a
    long way since then, but work is still in progress.
     
     
    > From the data I have,
    > there are legions of documents with such tweaks, so this is now a
    serious
    > interoperability problem.
     
    I won't debate that point. But I will correct inaccurate statements such
    as your earlier one about IE not handling re-ordering Indic vowels.
     
     
     
    Peter Constable


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