Dear all,
a lot was said in this thread about intelligent rendering mechanisms, such
as fonts implementing automatic glyph substitution and things like that. The
notion appears to be quite commonplace to the experts, whereas I (being an
amateur) must admit it seemed just like a utopic dream to me when I first
heard of the possibility of such a thing, a few months ago. I figure that
people are mostly thinking of the technology called "Open Type", is that
right?
Can anybody enlighten me about how much support for that technology is
already available in standard software, say, in browsers or text processors
under Windows 9x? If I had a True-Type font that implemented the glyph
substitutions, say, for the Greek combining diacritics, could I make my
average standard word processing software actually use these features? Or
would I have to wait for specialized multilingual word processors to appear
on the market?
I found the documentation of the "GetCharacterPlacement" function in the
Windows API. It looks like that was the place were these things should be
implemented system-wide. But I played with it a bit and found it didn't
actually do any glyph replacements. Is that function actually implemented in
Win98, or is it just a stub? Or did I make a mistake in my testing, or is
something wrong with my system? Can Win2000 do more than Win98 in this
respect?
I also noticed that MS Internet Explorer does use glyph replacement features
on my system when it is displaying Arabic. How does it do that? Would there
be a way of making it use other Open-Type features too?
Lukas Pietsch
Ferdinand-Kopf-Str. 11
D-79117 Freiburg
Tel. 0761-696 37 23
Universität Freiburg
Englisches Seminar
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