Re: Is Windows 7 Notepad broken?

From: David J. Perry (hospes.primus@verizon.net)
Date: Mon Jun 22 2009 - 22:18:08 CDT

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    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "Ed Trager" <ed.trager@gmail.com>

    >I think Notepad would be about my last choice for doing any kind of
    > serious work with Unicode ...
    Serious work no, but Notepad is actually very useful for testing because it
    usually reveals what the _system_ does, without the higher level stuff that
    word processors (or whatever app) add on. For instance, the Microsoft
    typography pages say that standard ligatures should be on by default in an
    OT font. Word ignores them, but guess what: they work in Notepad, which
    shows us that in fact Uniscribe is behaving as it should. The Word
    developers have ignored or overrriden this.

    > I'm not sure what the design mandate for Notepad is, if there is one,
    > but I would not expect it to include robust support for SMP Unicode.
    Well, I can't speak for the designers of Notepad, but since it is meant to
    be simple but yet conformant to what the normal rules for Windows are, one
    would expect it to display (at this point in time) any Unicode character.
    And it has always done so, for those that I have tried (including the
    supplementary private use areas!). I have used Old Italic, Gothic, Old
    Persian, etc.

    Just now I tried Phoenician using Notepad under Vista and it didn't work.
    The only font I have for Phoenician is Code2001, which has Phoenician
    characters beginning at U+10900; but they don't show in either BabelMap or
    when pasted into Notepad. So something is amiss. I don't have time now to
    try to figure out whether it's a defective font or something in Uniscribe or
    Notepad itself; my guess would be a Uniscribe problem.

    David

    > On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Saqqara<saqqara@saqqara.org> wrote:
    >> Anyone else had problems with Notepad on Windows 7 RC build (7100)?
    >>
    >> Egyptian Hieroglyphs from upcoming 5.2 don't display for me. I also tried
    >> Phoenician and characters don't display there either. Not investigated
    >> any
    >> further yet to discover to what extent Unicode in SMP is broken in
    >> Notepad
    >> or whether the problem runs deeper.
    >>
    >> Notepad for goodness sake!
    >>
    >> Bob Richmond
    >>
    >>
    >

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