James Kass wrote:
> > >..., the old 386's
> > >... may not be able
> > >to support an OS capable of using new rendering technology.
> >
> Indeed. And it wouldn't be fair to fault businesses reluctant to
> invest millions of dollars to target an impoverished market.
Well, I am not saying that it would be easy, or that it would be worth
doing, but would it really take *millions* of dollars for implementing
Unicode on DOS or Windows 3.1?
I think that many programmers and font designers on this list would be happy
do it, if they just had enough free time or a little funding.
BTW, I don't know in detail the current status of Unicode support on Linux,
but I know that projects are ongoing.
Couldn't that light but powerful OS be a possible key for bringing Unicode
(and other features) in smaller markets?
> > There is also an issue of practical feasibility, though: smart-font
> > rendering technologies are not fast. They depend on fast
> CPUs to give
> > adequate performance. Running Uniscribe/OT or Graphite on a
> 25MHz 386SX
> > probably wouldn't be pleasant for the user.
I think that more light-weight solutions are possible, although they might
require some trade-offs on the typographical quality.
And, although I appreciate fine typography, I am convinced that much less is
required to simply ensure written communication.
After all, most of 20th century's literature has been typed on monospaced
typewriters or on ASCII terminals: an Unicode implementation is a big step
forward even if it does not support all of the Zapf Dingbats, or 50 levels
of Combining Diacritics for Symbols...
> Pre-composed Latin characters in the PUA don't require
> any special rendering support, they'd be rendered the same
> as any precomposed BMP Latin character.
I thought that the PUA was being considered here as a place to put the extra
*glyphs* needed internally by a rendering engine -- not as a direct mean of
encoding text.
In the case of PUA being used as a repository of extra glyphs, special
rendering support is indeed required: which is, the part of the rendering
engine that maps sequences of base letter + diacritics to the precomposed
PUA code points.
> The 'cmap' in TrueType fonts for Windows uses double-byte encoding.
> (Windows NT supports the new specs which allow multi-byte.)
Does this mean that TrueType fonts for Windows NT would be capable of
breaking the 64-KB barrier and support a whole Unicode font which also
support extended planes? Really TrueType or OpenType?
>
http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/hmong/hmongaustpahawh.html#pa
hawh
What script is this? Do you know where I could find more info about it?
_ Marco
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