[With permission from Microsoft], I had the help file for the Extension A &
B IME/font that ships with Office XP (CHS and Hong Kong editions) translated
into English, those who are interested in reading a bit on Microsoft's
efforts to provide an IME to handle these characters can see it here:
http://www.i18nwithvb.com/surrogate_ime/
(no warranty about the translation or even the original text, of course!)
Now, most people will be more interested in the code charts that are
included in the help file, reproduced in this online version (divided into
the same 16 parts as the help file does). They can be found at
http://www.i18nwithvb.com/surrogate_ime/code_charts/
There are three ways to load each page:
1) DEFAULT -- the tables are loaded with the font specified as "Simsun
(Founder Extended)" -- the font that ships with the CHS and HK versions of
Office XP.
2) NO FONT SPECIFIED -- the tables are loaded with no font specified -- good
for people who do not have the font on their machine and have hope that
their browser will make up for this with an alternate font.
3) EOT -- the tables are loaded with an EOT file produced by WEFT -- good
for people who do not have the font but do have IE and so have a hope that
the EOT files will allow one to see the characters....
You will want to pay attention to the instructions on that default "code
charts" page on the configuration where I was able to verify that these
pages are rendered properly -- every other browser and OS combination I
tried would have some type of failure, in whole or part.
It was not my personal choice to prove that IE seems to have superior
support for Extension A and B, but I was unable to get either of the non-IE
browsers I tried to do such a hot job here. Even the IE case required
Win2000 or XP, properly set up for supplementary characters.
The two most interesting failures (IMHO):
1) Mozilla 0.9.3 -- Almost all of Ext. A shows up as question mark (?) and
all Ext B shows up as a double question mark (??) -- these are *not*
corrupted chars though -- copy and paste to Unicode notepad proves that the
actual characters are present, Mozilla is just using ? or ?? instead of the
default char. like it should be. Very weird and unexpected, to me at least.
:-)
2) IE >= 5.0 on machine set up for surrogate support and with font on
machine but without the font specified -- almost all of extension A is not
visible but all of extension B is -- I have been told this by various font
experts outside of MS that this is a known bug with displaying Extension A
characters in IE without the font explicitly specified.
Enjoy!
MichKa
Michael Kaplan
Trigeminal Software, Inc.
http://www.trigeminal.com/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Sep 27 2001 - 22:34:38 EDT