At 07:55 AM 4/17/2001 +0100, William Overington wrote:
>...It has occurred to me that it would be possible to use 21 bit unicode
>characters on a Windows 3.11 system or a Windows 95 system or a Windows 98
>system if there were a move towards writing some "for the purpose" software,
>such as a wordprocessor and a database package, using C or Turbo Pascal
>where the displayed characters are sought not from a font file via the
>system services of the operating system but from a font file that is stored
>in the same directory as the wordprocessor program and accessed as a binary
>file. The font file used could either be in an existing format or a special
>format could be devised....
Certainly this is technically feasible. What you are suggesting is that
application software chooses to implement their own alternatives to the
services they normally get from the operating system -- in this case,
character handling, layout, and font rasterisation.
Several examples of this exist in the market today. For instance, many of
the leading apps from Adobe Systems, such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe
InDesign, and Adobe Photoshop, contain their own layout and rasterisation
code. They depend only very minimally on system services. Note that these
examples require lots of system resources to run, and a system still
running Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 may well lack the memory or disk space
to support an application with all these capabilities.
There is no need to define a special font format. Just have the
applications parse the same exact font formats that the operating systems
parse.
>...Naturally, if some of the manufacturers of word processors and other
>packages might like to take up this idea and a common format for such font
>files could be devised by discussion in this list then the possibility could
>perhaps be realized in a relatively short space of time as such
>manufacturers might be able to convert their existing products.
>
>Would this be a good idea?
The problem with this idea is that it is very difficult -- read "costly" --
for software makers to duplicate the layout services provided by the
OS. Who would fund this effort? Would the customers using Windows 3.11 be
willing to pay for such software? If you show me a customer with a PC
running Windows 3.11, and USD 5,000 to spend on getting support for the
full 21 bit Unicode range, I'd use the 5,000 to buy the customer a new PC
and a current OS, and then install standard software on this new
machine. It's a lot cheaper and easier than re-inventing the system services.
--Jim DeLaHunt, Interim Head, Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
M/S W-08, 345 Park Ave, San Jose, CA 95110-2702
email: delahunt@adobe.com, tel: +1-408-536-2690
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