From: Elisha Berns (e.berns@computer.org)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 14:16:09 EDT
Andrew West wrote:
> By looping through the "ranges" array it is possible to determine
exactly
> which
> characters in which Unicode blocks a given font covers (as long as
your
> sofware
> has an array of Unicode blocks and their codepoint ranges).
> As long as your software has an up-to-date list of
> the
> Unicode blocks and their constituent codepoints for the latest version
of
> Unicode, you will always be able to get up to date information about
> Unicode
> coverage of a font.
>
> If you want to determine language coverage for a particular
> font,
> then all you need to do is define a minimum set of codepoints that
must be
> covered for a particular block or set of blocks to be considered as
> supporting
> that language. (Just the little matter of deciding what the minimum
set of
> codepoints would be for every language that is supported by Unicode
...)
>
Thanks so much for the detailed reply.
It would appear from your answer that even after implementing the
algorithm to search the Unicode block coverage of a font, the actual
comparison "data", that is which blocks to compare and how many code
points, is totally undefined. Is there any kind of standard for
defining what codepoints are required to write a given language? This
seems like the issue that fontconfig gets around by using all those
.orth files which define the codepoints for a given language. But is
there any standardized set of language required codepoint definitions
that could be used?
Anyways, where is the up-to-date list of Unicode blocks to be found?
It's odd to think that the old way of using Charset identifiers in fonts
worked a lot more cleanly for finding fonts matching a language/language
group. I would think this kind of core issue would be addressed more
cleanly by the font standard.
Thanks for any help.
Yours truly,
Elisha Berns
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