BTW, as long as we're talking about what you can do on a Mac... Did you
know that Apple actually ships TWO operating systems?
The "Mac OS X Server" OS, while nominally "a developer/server system for
brains, brawn & super security in the web-server room", is also a rather
user-friendly beautifully packaged BSD 4.4 Unix/Mach with Display PostScript
windowing. It runs on most new Mac hardware and on many mainstream Pentium
systems (and you can get the dev/deployment environment for Windows NT, too).
This OS ships... well, I mean "when Mac OS X Server 1.0 ships real soon
now"... it includes a bare-bones romaji/kanji henkan-ing Japanese input
method and some JIS0208-compatible fonts pre-packaged. Support is built-in
for arbitrary Latin combining marks, Latin 1 & 2. Chinese & Korean fonts and
a Korean input method are available for free also. And as Michael Everson
recently pointed out, a large suite of Everson Mono fonts is available to
display a great deal of the Unicode standard, including: most technical &
other symbols, Armenian, Cherokee, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Ogham,
Runic, Canadian Syllabics. (Arabic & Hebrew are not presently supported by
the OS.) Hex-input and keyboard emulation support is available for
downloading as well. "You need combining marks? We got combining marks."
And if you are a linguist and up to rolling your own fonts & input methods,
built-in support for Thai & Indic script display exists... etc.
Back to the subject... Minimal support is embedded some places in "Mac OS X
Server", as appropriate, for surrogates; and with some work, the display of
Plane-1 characters is possible utilizing mere PostScript fonts. They're
handled in the display system similarly to ligatures.
Rick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:42 EDT