From: Elisha Berns (e.berns@computer.org)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 00:58:28 EDT
Hi,
Some weeks back there were a number of postings about software for
viewing Unicode Ranges in TrueType fonts and I had a few questions about
that. Most viewers listed seemed to only check the Unicode Range bits of
the fonts which can be misleading in certain cases.
Anyways I wanted to ask the following: for a given, specific language
how can you tell if a font supports that language (as opposed to the
Unicode Range)? What I have noticed is that some fonts may support a
Unicode Range but may have only a few characters from that range and
thus cannot really be used for writing in that language. For example,
the font Estrangello Edessa supports Unicode Ranges for Arabic and
Syriac, but only has glyphs for Arabic numerals (and vowels?), but no
glyphs for the Arabic alphabet. It apparently however fully supports
the Syriac character set. So I would say that really it only supports
Syriac in any practical sense.
So If I were to algorithmically search for fonts supporting Arabic by
checking the Unicode Subset Range bits, I would assume, mistakenly, this
font supports Arabic writing. But if you want to search algorithmically
and find fonts that actually support a *language* and not just a partial
Unicode Range, how would you do it?
I did notice a posting regarding fontconfig:
"If you are on a system that uses fontconfig, such as most recent linux
distros, you can find out which fonts support a particular language
using fc-list; for example:"
$ fc-list :lang=ko
However, fontconfig apparently compiles in all of its .orth
(orthography) files for each supported language so it can do sort of a
manual computation of which font supports all the characters in a given
.orth file. (Did I get that right?) Short of compiling all this
information together manually and searching every font for complete
coverage of one of these sets of characters is there another way to go
about this?
Many thanks for any help here in this baffling world of Unicode,
Yours truly,
Elisha Berns
e.berns@computer.org
tel. (310) 556 - 8332
fax (310) 556 - 2839
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