From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Aug 22 2005 - 18:11:48 CDT
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> So all these leave me very perplex about the portability of fonts across
> systems (and I feat the Uniscribe only works reliably by detecting a few
> fonts made or accepted by Microsoft only, and whose names would be
> internally hardwired in Uniscribe). This may explain why some scripts
> can't work on all versions of Windows, and that fonts working with
> Uniscribe are severely tied to Uniscribe's implementation (or even
> worse, its version...).
This is complete and utter nonsense. I have many OpenType fonts for complex scripts, built
according to Microsoft's public specs, which work fine with Uniscribe regardless of who
made them. Uniscribe is made up of a number of different shaping engines, some general and
some script-specific. Different system or application versions support different scripts
and in different ways because they use different versions of Uniscribe. It has nothing to
do with hardwiring names of particular fonts. Please learn something about what you are
talking about before voicing bizarre guesswork.
In the OpenType model re-ordering is specifically NOT handled at the glyph level, but at
the character level. This is why it only works with standard Unicode characters, and not
codepoints in what I've come to regard as the 'Pretty Useless Area'.
Apple's AAT and, I believe, SIL's Graphite support glyph-level re-ordering. Indeed, they
require it for e.g. Indic scripts, which is one of the reasons why so few fonts are being
made in either format: the development is way more complicated than for OpenType.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Lords of the horizons, by Jason Goodwin Dining on stone, by Iain Sinclair
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