On Tuesday, May 22, 2001, at 02:48 PM, Ayers, Mike wrote:
> Even easier to use, it would be a lot. It may not seem this way to
> you, but I see all this as a set of flaming hoops. I just want to see
> characters without a lot of hassle. Even if I can't read the language,
> it
> isn't until I actually see the character that I will know that it is one
> which I don't recognize. An unprintable character mark could be
> something I
> recognize, but for which I have no font. An all-purpose font would
> solve
> that.
>
Apple's Last Resort font is an effort to handle this sort of situation.
It makes it possible for a glyph identifying the block for a character
to be used instead of a blank box. We tend to feel that this is better
for the general user, because it means that they don't need to learn to
recognize an arbitrary character from any of Unicode's scripts; they can
either simply learn a couple of dozen "last resort" glyphs or, failing
that, look it up in an on-line chart.
That is, if you don't read Yi, having a single glyph to identify any Yi
character as coming from Yi saves on system resources and conveys as
much information to you as having a full Yi font would.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/
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