From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2006 - 07:57:04 CST
On Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 06:53Z, Peter Constable wrote:
> You need three things for such combinations to display correctly: (1)
> OpenType fonts with special tables needed to support mark
> positioning, (2) support in the platform for Latin combining marks,
> and (3) applications that support Latin combining marks. Windows
> XP/SP2 includes the second item, and at least some of the apps that
> ship with Windows XP/SP2 (e.g. Notepad, Wordpad, IE) meet the bar for
> item 3. What's missing is item 1: the fonts that ship with XP/SP2 do
> not have the tables needed to position combining marks.
So plain XPsp2 does not work *just* because of the resident fonts.
> All of the Windows core fonts that will ship with Windows Vista have
> been updated to include support for combining marks as well as full
> Unicode 4.1 Latin character coverage (and Greek, etc. - all the fonts
> that the core fonts already support are updated to 4.1).
And those fonts already have updated versions which are OK.
Any chance to be able to backport those fonts (at least, the ones which
already exist in XP) into existing XPspN boxes, perhaps for some small fee,
or either protected with GenuineCheck or something similar?
Of course those fonts being part of xpSP3/2003sp2 would be optimum, but I
guess it's dreaming.
I know doing the backporting ourselves is a clear and direct violation of
the licenses (at least those of the Vista source.) However, it seems to me
there is no additional royalty to be expected _if_ one sticks with the fonts
provided with XP, so the licensing conditions w.r.t. Monotype and others
seem to be clearable to me.
I also know it technically works OK, of course!
(And an educated guess is that there will be bootleg versions/setups which
will have this illegal setup. Note that I do not recommend it.)
So I think it is merely a packaging problem (which could be seen as a
marketing problem too; however, I do not believe anyone will update to Vista
_just_ to get those pretty fonts; and the hardware gap between both OS is so
large it will indeed become a question.)
I *know* this is asking for supplementary work for *you*, Peter.
Antoine
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