From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2006 - 23:39:21 CST
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> Apparently, before looking up for the correct font to use to render a
> script, IE performs a fast check on the text to see if the font used in
> the parent element is "usable" to render the anonymous text element. It
> only checks for the script types claimed by this current font.
> Unfortunately, "Arial Unicode MS" pretends supporting Bengali, Oriya,
> Telugu and Malayalam (for Oriya, it just contains the national digit
> characters, and for the 3 others it has enough glyphs but lacks the
> OpenType layout and shaping tables).
But if it didn't claim to be 'functional' for those *blocks*, IE 6.0 would
not use it for the characters even if explicitly specified! (Firefox will
use the explicitly specified font if it contains the glyphs.) There is a
problem in that 'functional' is not defined - the Windows OS/2 table
specification (14/10/02?) says, 'The determination of "functional" is left
up to the font designer, although character set selection should attempt to
be functional by ranges if at all possible'. I've had the converse
problem - a hack font wouldn't render properly in IE 6.0 because it said it
wasn't 'functional' for 'Basic Latin' although nearly half its useful glyphs
needed to be accessed through ASCII code points.
As an aside, what happens for BMP blocks not covered by the OS/2 table, e.g.
Glagolitic?
Is there a Version 1.5 of the OpenType Specification? I've seen one
non-authoritative reference to it, and it may be no more than a draft.
Richard.
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