Re: [OT] Slight Font Confusion

From: Yaap Raaf (yaapraaf@xs4all.nl)
Date: Wed Mar 06 2002 - 17:57:07 EST


At 15:57 +0100 2002.03.06, John H. Jenkins wrote:

> MS Office X converts Unicode text to runs of older Mac
> script systems and does not use ATSUI. It is therefore
> limited in the extent to which it supports Unicode.

Is the conclusion correct that MS Office X uses one or several
KCHR resources? And that QuickDraw is still part of OSX?

What about Devanagari in OSX. Again guessing, the Devanagari
font in OSX is the same font, unaltered, as it came with OS 9. AFAIK
there is no UHCR resource for Devanagari other than Unicode Hex Input.
Is the Devanagari-QWERTY keyboard available for it under OSX
even without Classic? I guess so. Since QWERTY can also be used with
SUE, which is an ATSUI app, does it mean there is no fixed relation
between these different input resources and rendering engines?
Is there any combination of KCHR, UHCR <> QuickDraw, ATSUI that
does not work?

Apart from it being limited to 8-bit charsets, what other limitations
does QuickDraw have as opposed to ATSUI?

ATSUI applications combined with UHCR resources don't need TEC
anymore? Unicode everywhere in this case?

I have the impression that somehow AAT fonts are less dependent on
ATSUI than OT fonts are on Uniscribe. In fact I am a bit amazed that
with all the tables and 'intelligence' built into OT fonts they are so
dependent on updates of Uniscribe. I do not hear about updates of
ATSUI. Are there fundamental differences between ATSUI and Uniscribe?

I would think that once Uniscribe has the capacity to process Arabic
and Devanagari it could manage about everything any complex font will
ask for. Certainly something like combining combining marks with base
characters, provided the information for where exactly they have to go,
will be present in the font. But this seems to be something for a rather
distant future. I may be well underestimating the complexities, sorry for
my ignorance.

Making Unicode keyboards was "something of a black art on the Mac"
almost a year ago. Does this still hold?

Yaap

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