At 17:34 11/03/02 -0600, Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
>On 03/11/2002 12:58:16 AM "Chris Pratley" wrote:
>
>>While it is true that in terms of absolute numbers most apps do not yet
>>support UTF-16, it is worth noting that OfficeXP and anything based on
>>mshtml.dll ver.6 (e.g. IE 6) or Riched20.dll v.4 (e.g. Wordpad in WinXP)
>>do handle surrogate characters from UTF-16 correctly. So in terms of
>>usage, surrogate support is covered pretty well as adoption of these
>>newer versions increases.
>
>But I believe there is another problem: I'm pretty sure that the TrueType
>rasterisation part of Win9x/Me does not support the newer cmap formats
>that are required to display glyphs for non-BMP characters. So, the apps
>may understand the characters, but unless they are reading the cmap tables
>on their own and drawing text as glyph strings, you won't see the glyphs
>on Win9x/Me.
>
>I expect Chris was assuming Win2K/XP, since it is very definitely a better
>platform for script support. This issue of support for newer cmap formats
>is but one reason why.
The trouble is that in the real world no-one uses Win2K/XP. No-one uses Win9x/Me either. They just use Windows. Ask a user any more than that, and he'll look blank; insist on an answer, and he'll go off and buy something else. So we need to be able to run equally well on both platforms without having to ask.
That said, anyone who uses non-BMP characters will already know that they all look the same on his system (even if he doesn't know explicitly that it's 9x/Me), so *in this particular case* we should be able to get away with it.
Of course, we can't assume mshtml.dll ver.6 or Riched20.dll v.4 or even Uniscribe, since none of these are part of Windows either...
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Mar 12 2002 - 03:58:37 EST