On Mon, 26 Aug 2002, William Overington wrote:
> This latest version is SC UniPad 0.99 and is available for free download
> from the following address on the web.
>
> http://www.unipad.org
On several occasions, I heard about it on this mailing list and finally
my curiosity drove me to try it. Unfortunately, I was mightly
disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it
supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul
Jamos is supported and wanted to see if it really support them. Well,
it does not do any better than most other fonts/software that made that
claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of combining
characters. Basically, it's useless except for making Unicode code chart
(so is Arial MS Unicode.)
Then, I found its claim that it supports 300 languages(scripts). Wow !
Does it properly support various South and Southeast Asian scripts?
Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing characters.
I don't think users of those scripts would regard SC Unipad as supporting
their scripts/languages.
Its FAQ 4.2 has the following:
SC> We have to differentiate between the simple inclusion of
SC> the glyphs into the UniPad font and the implementation of special
SC> text processing algorithms. It's definitely our goal to finally support
SC> all CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters and all Indic scripts
SC> (Devanagari, Gurmukhi, etc.).
Judging from the above, I think they are well aware that simply including
the nominal glyphs for scripts taken from the Unicode code chart in
the UniPad font is diffferent from supporting scripts. In addition,
its list of general features makes it clear that it does not support
'combined rendering of non-spacing marks'. I can't help wondering, then,
why they list Hindi, Thai, Tibetan, Lao, Bengali and many other
South and Southeast Asian languages in the list of supported languages.
> A particularly interesting new feature is that one may hold down the Control
> key and press the Q key and a small dialogue box appears within which one
> may enter the hexadecimal code for any Unicode character. Upon pressing the
> I first learned of the existence of the UniPad program in a response to a
> question which I asked in this forum, so I am posting this note so that any
You may want to check out Yudit (http://www.yudit.org). Although its
author is not so fond of MS Windows, it works in MS Windows as well
as in Unix/X11. It supports South and Southeast Asian scripts, Arabic,
Hebrew with BIDI, Hangul Jamos(at the same level as Korean MS Office XP
in terms of the number of syllables made out of Jamos) and many other
(easier-to-deal-with) writing systems with various input methods/keyboards
(including Unicode codepoint in hex input). It can also represent
unrenderable characters with hex code in a box. If it lacks support for
your script/language and you can code, you may be able to add it yourself
either for yourself or with the author's help as I did for Hangul Jamos.
Jungshik
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