Peter Constable wrote:
>
> >Funding makes the world revolve, free time makes it rotate.
>
> I'm glad someone set me straight. I've been told all these years it was
> gravity, but I had my doubts... :-)
>
Levity helps, too.
>
>
> >If the PUA is used in order to display Latin Unicode on older
> >systems, like Win 9x, the source page in true Unicode would need
> >to be converted to a new file using the PUA encodings before it
> >could be displayed.
>
> Eh? It's not clear to me what you're meaning here, but it sounds incorrect.
> Win9x supports drawing text encoded as UTF-16 (but not supplementary plane
> characters) or as glyph IDs in addition to an 8-bit Windows codepage
> (single or multi-byte).
Win 9x can't display the Unicode string forming the character
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER OPEN O WITH DIAERESIS (U+0186, U+0308).
It could display the character if it had a PUA code point and a font.
The Unipad Editor, or any app using fixed width fonts, will display
the above string as the character "OPEN O" followed by a glyph
representing U+0308, usually a dotted circle with combining diaeresis.
The Unipad Editor, by the way, does a fine job of displaying and
editing Unicode plain text, even on Windows 95. If a PUA scheme
for Latin with diacritics was used, groups like Sharmahd might
elect to incorporate new PUA glyphs in their proprietary fonts
to help support challenged languages. Any plain text application
which can't process combining glyphs could process pre-composed
glyphs. (Ɔ◌̈̈ Ɔ̈ ɔ◌̈ ɔ̈) None of these combos display well here.
I don't know how to display a glyph in HTML on Win 95 by its
glyph ID, but it's easily done with a PUA code point. So, I'd take
the HTML source file encoded in valid Unicode from the web and
convert it into a new, non-standard HTML file on my hard drive,
and then open the new file in the browser, off-line. Until the
Uniscribe is updated, I'd need to do this even on Windows ME and
W2K.
This bit about PUA is only for Latin extensions. Providing complete
Unicode support on older OSs would need many more code points
than are in the BMPs PUA, and like Marco suggests, would probably
need some kind of meta-BDF-font.
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT