From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2006 - 17:56:05 CST
From: "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com>
>> From: Philippe Verdy [mailto:verdy_p@wanadoo.fr]
>> Here are some screenshots for Bengali, Oriya and Telugu...
>
> The text in your screenshots looks to me like it might be Arial Unicode MS. As I explained earlier, this font does not provide shaping support for all scripts. That is a font issue, not an issue with IE.
"I" am not using it. The page does not specify it and not even its CSS stylesheets. IE just decides itself to this font instead of the font that I have properly set up for these Bengali, Oriya, Telugu and Malayalam scripts. For example In IE, the "Kartika" or "Akshar Unicode" fonts are manually preselected for Malayalam instead of the default. As well, for Bengali, the "Rupali" or "Solaiman Lipi" or "Vrinda" fonts are preselected instead of the default.
If the installation of "Arial Unicode MS" by Office puts havoc to the rendering of Indic scripts, then this breaks Windows and IE, so it would be a Office bug, because it ships a font that IE preselects with some unknown logic but that doesnot render Indic scripts properly. Arial Unicode MS should then either NOT contain those Indic scripts, or should implement them correctly (like it does for Devanagari and Tamil).
But what I don't understand is that it does not break Firefox (whch should normally select the same font with the samelogic) or Notepad (if the appropriate font isselect for thesescripts, or when the preselected font is not usable for that script and the renderer attemps to select automatically another suitable fontfor these scripts).
The situation would then be much better if "Arial Unicode MS" did not insisted saying to Windows that it supports these scripts, because this is NOT the font that is selected. Windows or IE decide themselves to use it, and for some unknown reason ignore the correct font specified in user settings. Webpoages shouldnot have to specify explicitly the Windows-specific correct fonts to use for these scripts, and the default settings or the user settings should be honored instead (but it should not use the font specified in regional settings for the pseudo-script "specified by user" (which any user will typically set to a "catch all" multiscript font like Arial Unicode MS or Code2000, if a user sets this option).
I get this problem even on default Windows installations, from a new user account where not specific font has been selected and kept in the user's registry. There may be some magic behind the scene that selects the wrong font, but for me bad fonts are a nightmare, and bad fonts are installedwith Office (Arial Unicode MS is one of them, although it is very useful to support large scripts).
But after thought, you just gave me the solution: deleting "Arial Unicode MS" from the Fonts folder, when Office has been installed on the system... (I hope it will not be restored automatically from Office Update...)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Mar 18 2006 - 17:57:37 CST