From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Wed Jun 30 2004 - 18:08:23 CDT
On 30/06/2004 11:18, busmanus wrote:
> Peter Kirk wrote:
>
>> If you prefer to use precomposed characters
>
>
> I need to use them at the moment, because my word
> processor does not support the trickier aspects
> of rendering combined glyphs (e.g. making use of
> the "corner points", etc.). I can't even make it
> use a precomposed ligature for a letter+combining
> diacritical combination. Can you recommend anything
> more advanced in this respect (if it doesn't qualify
> as an ad)?
>
I'm not sure I quite understand your problem.
If your word processor displays Unicode characters at all, it should
display precomposed glyphs like the ones in the Extended Greek block -
unless the word processor has built-in canonical decomposition, which
seems improbable. I see from your message source that you are using
Windows 98. On that system you should have no problem displaying
Extended Greek in the built-in Wordpad, or with Microsoft Word (but this
is not a Microsoft ad!) or (free) Open Office.
But your system will not do a good job of rendering decomposed
characters. It will neither combine them programmatically nor replace
them with precomposed character glyphs. For proper rendering of
decomposed characters you really need to upgrade to Office 2003 on
Windows 2000 or XP. This is a good reason to use the precomposed
characters instead.
Ken Whistler's recommendation to use decomposed characters, which is
probably only a personal one, does not make good sense at the present
time with your particular system setup. In fact I am not sure when there
would ever be a significant advantage in decomposed characters, as long
as there is a precomposed font available. A perfect system would level
the playing field by processing and rendering the two alternatives
identically, making it essentially irrelevant which you choose.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jun 30 2004 - 18:10:09 CDT