From: Don Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2008 - 10:54:18 CDT
This is interesting, but at first I thought "last resort" meant that this was a font that covered a selection of characters that are under-represented among the most widely available and commonly used fonts (however that would be determined!).
If I understand correctly, what it actually seems to be is a way of having something more informative than an empty box or question mark when a character in a text is not included on any font installed on the user's computer. It somehow determines the appropriate character block in which the missing character is encoded and returns the symbol for that block.
If that is correct, it might help to introduce the concept at the top in this way. It also means that the first advantage - "Operating systems are freed from the overhead of providing a full Unicode font" - is not entirely accurate. You would still need to find and load an appropriate font for the missing characters (for the script[s] involved or even a full Unicode font if it comes to that), but the LRF lets you know what character block(s) needs to be covered.
Don Osborn
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