RE: Unicode Fonts

From: Tim Greenwood (greenwood@openmarket.com)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 10:38:57 EST


Listfont is a very nice freeware windows utility that lists and shows script
ranges for all the fonts on your system.
http://sun1.rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de/nhbieich/listfont.htm

Tim
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hart, Edwin F. [mailto:Edwin.Hart@jhuapl.edu]
> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 8:26 AM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: RE: Unicode Fonts
>
>
> You will find that Courier New, Times New Roman and Arial also have Hebrew
> and Arabic characters, and several Arabic presentation forms. I'd guess
> that the Arabic glyphs are the same in Arial and Times New Roman.
>
> Ed Hart
>
> Edwin F. Hart
> The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
> 11100 Johns Hopkins Road
> Laurel, MD 20723-6099
> +1-443-778-6926 (Baltimore)
> +1-240-228-6926 (DC Area)
> +1-443-778-1093 (fax, Baltimore)
> +1-240-228-1093 (fax, DC area)
> edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher John Fynn [mailto:cfynn@dircon.co.uk]
> Sent: Friday, March 31, 2000 00:28
> To: Unicode List
> Cc: Suzanne Topping
> Subject: Re: Unicode Fonts
>
> Suzanne Topping <stopping@rochester.rr.com>
>
> > This comes from a question Joon posed recently. His exact question (off
> > list) was: "...I am trying to figure out how many and which Unicode
> > characters do not have a glyph on a Standard Unicode TrueType font."
> > Pronunciation symbols seemed to be a particular problem.
>
> Suzanne
>
> I don't think there is such a thing as a "Standard" Unicode TrueType font.
>
> Fonts which have glyphs for all, or nearly all, the characters in Unicode
> tend
> to consume enormous resources, not properly support complex scripts, not
> have
> e.g. Chinese and Japanese variant glyphs for CJK characters, and generally
> have
> fairly crude glyph outlines for some scripts.
>
> Much better to have a series of individual fonts specifically designed for
> the
> scripts and languages covered by Unicode. For complex scripts fonts really
> need
> to contain the proper OpenType (on Windows) or ATSUI (on Mac) tables and
> quite a
> large number of ligature and variant glyphs which are accessed by the
> rendering
> system via these tables depending on context etc.
>
> A font which simply has one glyph corresponding to each Devanagri, Urdu,
> Tibetan, etc. character in Unicode is useless for properly
> displaying these
> scripts.
>
> Microsoft Windows "WGL4" fonts, including Times New Roman and Arial have
> glyphs
> cover a sub-set of Unicode characters to support Microsoft's code pages
> 1250,
> 1251, 1252, 1253, and 1254. They cover Latin, Latin Extended A, basic
> Cyrillic
> and basic Greek and some symbols and additional Latin characters (see
> http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/WGL4.htm).
>
> For a list of TT fonts which "support Unicode" (and the Unicode
> ranges they
> cover) see: http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/fonts.html
>
> - Chris
>



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