RE: Unicode Devanagari Font in Mozilla

From: Michael Jansson (mjan@em2-solutions.com)
Date: Tue Jul 16 2002 - 06:33:22 EDT


You might be OK if you play by the rules. Then again, you might not ;-)

A few details; You can not use neither Arial Unicode MS nor Code 2000 to
show Indic text with Uniscribe on Windows, as Uniscribe works with OpenType
Layout fonts (fonts containing more than just the glyphs to support a
language, i.e. glyph shaping and positioning information). Other shaping
engines may be able to use these fonts though. The version of the fonts and
Uniscribe would affect this behavior as well.

Also, there is nothing wrong with neither Latha nor Mangal, nor are these
the only fonts that can be used to show Indic languages on Windows. Win9x
simply depends on Code Page information in fonts for various legacy reasons,
and are as such not equipped to handle "pure" Unicode fonts (this is at
least my understand of this issue).

If you want to use Indic Unicode fonts with Uniscribe on Win9x, then you
better make sure that you build the fonts for Win9x yourself. Then again,
even that may not work... ;-)

Regards,
- Michael

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael (michka) Kaplan [mailto:michka@trigeminal.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2002 12:11 PM
> To: Michael Jansson
> Cc: Unicode List
> Subject: Re: Unicode Devanagari Font in Mozilla
>
>
> Since you are not allowed to redistribute Latha, Mangal, et.
> al., this is
> really not going to be too much of a hardship for anyone
> playing by the
> rules, is it? :-)
>
> They can always legally obtain Arial Unicode MS or Code 2000
> and then have
> support via fonts that definitely have such ranges represented....
>
>
> MichKa
>
> Michael Kaplan
> Trigeminal Software, Inc. -- http://www.trigeminal.com/
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Jansson" <mjan@em2-solutions.com>
> To: <unicode@unicode.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2002 2:34 AM
> Subject: Re: Unicode Devanagari Font in Mozilla
>
>
> > > James Kass wrote:
> > > The best way to render a Devanagari page is with Unicode encoding
> > > and smart font technology. With an up-to-date version of the
> > > Uniscribe software installed, Devanagari can be properly displayed
> > > even on Win 9x, as long as the browser uses the Uniscribe engine.
> >
> > You need to be careful when using Uniscribe on Win9x.
> Installing certain
> > Indic fonts and Uniscribe on unsupported platforms (Win9x) will
> > unfortunately corrupt these systems. The problem is that Win9x will
> > misbehave when seeing fonts without code page support, such
> as Indic fonts
> > with no Latin characters.
> >
> > Regards,
> > - Michael
> >
> >
>



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