I have had a look, as a new member, at the messages referring to one and
unique unicode font, and the main questions and answers, as far as there
are answers, regarding the necessity or non-necessity of having at least
a unicode font installed in the system, and whether such a unicode font
is absolutely necessary; and also whether there should be a monolithic
unicode font or a group of fonts which, all together, should make a
unicode font.
1. Yes, in our age of communication such a font, or group of fonts, is
necessary because you can never know, at professional level, what kind
of book/paper/article one can receive via e-mail or floppy. Personally,
as a linguist, I currently use West European (inevitably, yes), Central
European, Cyrillic and Greek, and - if sending a linguistic paper via
e-mail - I must be sure that the recipient can correctly decode what I
wrote. What happens if I add some two-three words in Armenian or
Georgian or Hebrew...? If the other computer has not the software and
font(s) capable of correctly reading this, we revert to the old days
when we had to specifically indicate the font(s) used, print the stuff,
and add other indications. The problem is the same for other
professionals, engineers or mathematicians...
2. There is a problem of choice at the level of software developers how
to deal with unicode fonts, i.e. whether to develop a huge, monolithic
font or to create groups of font families for each script. More
important than this is to be able to know whether the received document
may be correctly read, and whether the installed font(s) and software
are capable of decryption; if not, a warning should be displayed,
something like "the original document uses glyphs not available in your
system". But such a warning should be eliminated as it would be frequent
indeed.
3. Another problem has been connected to the different font encoding
used by the various platforms, mainly Windows and MAC OS (I do not know
how Linux looks like); this was A BIG PROBLEM, seemingly on the way to
be solved by MAC OS X which, as I could see, offers reasonable
compatibility with Windows (testing may be only limited now, as MAC OS X
is still incomplete; its claimed 'full unicode' capabilities are rather
theoretical, but this is seemingly a problem of weeks/months to be
solved). Well, the only reasonable cross-platform font encoding/decoding
solution is via unicode, and this seems to be implemented this year.
4. Nobody uses indeed all the glyphs of all the languages and
conventional symbols of the world, but revert to 1, and you find that at
least one unicode font/groups of fonts is/are necessary. Everson Mono
for MAC OS X SERVER seems a good solution, unfortunately it does not
seem to work with MAC OS X (at least I couldn't, if you can provide
help, please do). I think that software developers should have in mind a
solution for TWO unicode fonts/groups of unicode fonts: a Swiss type and
a serif type. If various people need more, this may be done locally or
specifically for the scripts in view.
5. For sure, there still are glyphs not included in the last Unicode 3.1
version; as I could note, Glagolitic is missing, and I think some
specific fonts used in the various Old Church Slavonic texts are also
missing (I shall make an analysis at our university, and revert with
solutions). There are also the Neolithic graphemes of southeast Europe,
the earliest proof of sacred writing in southeast Europe, maybe the
earliest in the world. I tried to map them, and am ready to send the
data to anyone interested. The students at UCLA are perhaps familiar
with them as late Marija Gimbutas and Shan Winn worked on this for years.
Dr. Sorin Paliga
University of Bucharest
Slavic Dept
paliga@fx.ro
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