From: Behnam (behnam.rassi@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 12 2008 - 17:22:27 CDT
On 12-Jun-08, at 5:11 PM, Simon Montagu wrote:
> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>> This presumably implies that if the Last Resort (or LastResort?)
>> font has been installed, a glyph from it is displayed instead. And
>> this is better for people with no idea of Unicode, as well as to
>> some who have some idea. It might be worse for people who know
>> Unicode: they will see just the generic glyph (which they might or
>> might not recognize in its intended meaning, by intuition or by
>> having learned it), not information about the specific code point.
>
> I discovered that there is in fact a serious disadvantage when
> LastResort is installed on systems other than OSX: applications
> don't know to give it lower priority than other fonts, and both
> Firefox and IE sometimes use it even for scripts that I already
> have fonts for.
On OS X it is a very useful feature. But not for Arabic script.
Because it only shows the generic shape of the main letters and it
doesn't have AAT tables for 'contextualization' of Arabic characters.
And even if it had, it couldn't be useful.
Generally speaking 'back-up' fonts won't work for Arabic script
because if they provide one missing character in the middle of an
Arabic word formed by another font, it will break the formation and
contextualization of the primary font for that word. For Arabic
script, one single font covering the whole range of the script and
with necessary contextualization tables should be considered, and
also, it should be considered that once the back-up font takes over,
it should handle the reminder of the text by itself. Or at least
whatever exists between two spaces.
SIL International has two excellent full range Arabic fonts with
tables for both platforms. They can do this more than adequately.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ArabicFonts
Behnam
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jun 12 2008 - 17:26:03 CDT