From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 21:21:40 EST
This may be the fault of the application not Windows. Many Windows applications
do not take advantage of the support for Unicode, OpenType layout, and font
linking which is present in Windows 2000 & XP.
It's plain silly to expect support for every Unicode character to be present on
every platform and in every application "right out of the box" soon after
characters are officially encoded in the Unicode Standard, especially
characters for scripts have complex rendering requirements. Fonts for some
scripts can take a long time to make properly, and then they have to be tested.
Layout engines may need updating and these have to be thoroughly tested too.
Then applications need to be updated to handle proper line breaking, word
selection and so on.
Things like math formulas may and music notation have their own special layout
requirements - there is not much point of simply producing a font with "basic"
glyphs for the characters if they cannot be rendered properly in formulas or
music notation.
- Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: Arcane Jill
To: unicode@unicode.org
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 5:07 PM
Subject: RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?
You misunderstand me. Whilst I have no objection to paying for ADDED value, I'm
talking about what comes built in, out of the box.
Consider the literary equivalent. Suppose I went to a library and borrowed a
book, took it home, and attempted to read it (the real world equivalent of
viewing a web page). Suppose then, that instead of readable characters, a
critical math formula was printed as a series of "unsupported character"
glyphs, and that subsequent exploration revealed that the book could only be
read if I, the reader (not the publisher), were to pay money to the font
designer. I would feel (rightly, I think) aggrieved.
You see, I'm not talking about "good" fonts, just "basic" fonts. In fact, any
fonts. Essentially, I expect every character to display, albeit poorly, but to
display. I expect the operating system to provide a fallback font for every
character. The Macintosh does exactly this. Windows doesn't. That's all.
Jill
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