At 00:35 7/28/2001 -0700, Myanmar Triumph Int'l Ltd. wrote:
>1. In each and every OS Platform (such as Microsoft Win9x, Win2K, Mac, IBM
>OS2, Unix, Linux etc...), is there anything like native font format?
Not as such. I think it would be fair to describe data fork TTFs as the
Windows 9x, ME and NT native font format. Things get more complicated in
Windows 2000, with native support for PostScript fonts and both flavours of
OpenType.
>(What drove me to ask this question is that AFAIK, .ttf was designed for
>Apple Macintosh, then, I'd like to claim .ttf as a native font format of
>Mac, Can I?.)
You might run into trouble with resource fork TTFs vs. data fork TTFs,
depending on which version of the OS you are running. Data fork TTFs are
the Windows standard, and resource fork TTFs were long the Apple standard.
Mac OS X natively supports both versions; Max OS 9 only exposes data fork
TTFs to ATSUI applications; other versions of the OS do not support data
fork TTFs at all, as far as I know. Like Windows 2000, Mac OS X includes
native support for PostScript fonts.
John Jenkins at Apple can probably provide more precise information. He may
or may not want to burden you with knowledge of the esoteric .dfont format.
>4. What is the best font format that I should use in case I'd like to
enter unicode values?
You need a font with a Unicode cmap if you want to be able to handle
Unicode characters from beyond existing 8-bit codepages. The best format,
in terms of broad support, is OpenType. An OpenType font has a TrueType
table structure, but can contain either TrueType or PostScript glyph
outline data.
For more information, see
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/default.htm
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
There are sheep in the field. 'I know what they are,' she says,
'but I don't know what they are called.' Thus Wittgenstein is
routed by my mother. (Alan Bennett, Diaries 1983)
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