>Some German font vendors, e.g. http://www.softmaker.de or
http://www.data-becker.de are now offering font collections for Windows with TWO
Euro signs in all fonts: the official glyph at 0x87 and a glyph
adapted to each font at 0xA4 (replacing the "currency symbol" which
is the Unicode symbol Ux00A4 at the compatible place!).
THUS THERE IS A REAL DANGER THAT AN INCOMPATIBLE
QUASI-STANDARD ARISES!!!
I agree that there is a danger, and there is a better way for a font vendor to
handle the change in the definition of CP1252: Older MS software, e.g. Win 95
(w/o Eurofix patch) assumes that cp1252 maps x80 to U+0080, but newer MS
software, e.g. Win 98, assumes a mapping of x80 to U+20AC. The trick is to get
the euro glyph to show up whenever a document contains x80 (assuming, of course
we're dealing with cp1252) regardless of which OS is used, i.e. regardless of
which mapping is used. The way to do this is to have the cmap in the font make
both U+0080 and U+20AC point to the euro glyph. I've already applied this fix in
some fonts. (Similar treatment for x8E and x9E.)
Granted that this is a violation of Unicode conformance. Yes, it's a hack on the
Unicode standard, but if people are going to look for kludges to fix a problem
that was created by a less than ideal 'enhancement' to the OS, I'd rather they
do this than do things like getting people accessing euro glyphs from x87
(double dagger in cp1252). After all, U+0080 is not associated with any glyph
that *anybody* is ever going to depend upon.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:46 EDT