RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 12:27:09 EST

  • Next message: John Hudson: "RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?"

    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
    Behalf Of Arcane Jill

    >You misunderstand me. Whilst I have no objection to paying for ADDED
    value, I'm >talking about what comes built in, out of the box.

    So, out of the box, Windows XP does not support (e.g.) Sinhalese, or
    ship with Sinhalese fonts. And so, if the next version of Windows does
    include support for Sinhalese and perhaps even ships with one or more
    Sinhalese fonts, that will be added value, right?

    >Consider the literary equivalent...

    I don't think your analogy is all that great. But the point is that
    Microsoft has never made any claim that Windows XP supports all of
    Unicode 4.0. If you want to know what portions of Unicode Microsoft
    *does* claim that Windows XP supports, see
    http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/winxp.mspx.

    >You see, I'm not talking about "good" fonts, just "basic" fonts. In
    fact, any fonts. Essentially, I expect every character to display,
    albeit poorly, but to display. I expect the operating system to provide
    a fallback font for every character. The Macintosh does exactly this.
    Windows doesn't. That's all.

    If Windows XP includes (say) a Sinhalese font and is able to display a
    nominal glyph for each Sinhalese character but cannot shape it
    correctly, you might be content, but there will be far more people
    complaining that MS gives the impression that they support Sinhalese but
    that it's full of bugs.

    Apple has included a fallback font that shows (if there's no font for,
    say, Sinhalese) for a given character what Unicode range it is from (in
    my example, U+0D80..U+0DFF). No more. That is a small bit of value that
    they have added that MS has not. Last time I heard, they do *not*
    provide fonts covering all of Unicode 4.0 (with the nominal glyphs for
    each character, or full shaping support), just as MS or Sun or any other
    platform vendor does not.

    Peter
     
    Peter Constable
    Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
    Microsoft Windows Division

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Dec 02 2003 - 13:21:35 EST