Jungshik Shin <jshin at mailaps dot org> wrote:
> On several occasions, I heard about it on this mailing list and
> finally my curiosity drove me to try it. Unfortunately, I was mightly
> disappointed. At first, I was intrigued by their claim that it
> supports Hangul Jamos. I've seen some false claims that Hangul
> Jamos is supported and wanted to see if it really support them. Well,
> it does not do any better than most other fonts/software that made
> that claim. It just treats them as 'spacing characters' instead of
> combining characters. Basically, it's useless except for making
> Unicode code chart (so is Arial MS Unicode.)
This is one of those cases where the verb "support" is so flexible that
it loses meaning. UniPad does include glyphs for individual jamos as
well as precomposed Hangul syllables, which is more than most
non-Korean-specific TrueType fonts can offer. But it does not provide
any mechanism for combining jamos into syllables, which of course is
required for proper handling of Korean. Again, I don't know of any
other mainstream Windows tools or fonts that can do this either
(although I'm sure there are Korean-specific tools that can).
> Then, I found its claim that it supports 300 languages(scripts). Wow !
> Does it properly support various South and Southeast Asian scripts?
> Again, it does not. It treats combining characters as spacing
> characters. I don't think users of those scripts would regard SC
> Unipad as supporting their scripts/languages.
UniPad never claims to support 300 scripts. I'm not even sure there are
300 scripts. Probably half of the 300 "supported languages" are written
with the Latin script. But again, Jungshik has a good point that true
"support" for Devanagari, Khmer, etc. really does imply shaping and
combining behavior, similar to what UniPad already provides for Arabic.
> You may want to check out Yudit (http://www.yudit.org). Although its
> author is not so fond of MS Windows,
That's putting it mildly -- he refers to Win32 as a "joke-api" [sic] and
brags several times that he "will never touch Windows again."
> it works in MS Windows as well as in Unix/X11.
I haven't downloaded it yet, so I haven't seen whether this is true. I
have my doubts, however, based on release notes like the following:
"CreateProcess works in an unexpected way so the viewer won't find the
file. As a workaround execute yudit from the desktop shortcut."
No real Windows application gives a hoot whether you run it from a
desktop shortcut, the Start menu, a taskbar button, the Start | Run
dialog box, or a command-prompt window.
> It supports South and Southeast Asian scripts, Arabic,
> Hebrew with BIDI, Hangul Jamos(at the same level as Korean MS Office
> XP in terms of the number of syllables made out of Jamos) and many
> other (easier-to-deal-with) writing systems with various input
> methods/keyboards (including Unicode codepoint in hex input). It can
> also represent unrenderable characters with hex code in a box. If it
> lacks support for your script/language and you can code, you may be
> able to add it yourself either for yourself or with the author's help
> as I did for Hangul Jamos.
"If you can code" is a big stumbling block for anyone who is not a
programmer. But certainly Yudit, like other similar open-source
projects, appears to be highly extensible.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
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