Re: But E0000 Custom Language Tags Are Actually *Required* For Use By Unicode

From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Fri Mar 04 2005 - 22:53:30 CST

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    Doug <UList@dfa-mail.com> wrote:

    > But I thought the whole Unicode ideal was to replace all those different fonts
    > with one single "Unicode Lucida (Grande)" font -- and not a font that contains
    > every abstract characterhood -- but a font that can actually display every
    > basic letterform needed for every writing system.

    In most situations large pan-unicode fonts are generally not a good idea
    except as a fall back. For a start they consume a huge amount of memory and
    resources. If you wanted to make a fonts that fully support all the complex
    scripts in Unicode with proper rendering you'd find that they would be be
    almost impossible to build and maintain. How many years do you think it
    would take to create just one font like this?

    IMO much better are "font linking" schemes which allow you to specify
    seperate fonts for each script in such a way that when you are using a given
    Latin font and enter characters from another script the renderer
    automatically uses glyphs from the particular font for the other script
    which is "linked" to the specified Latin font.

    CSS probably needs extending to make this easier to do for XML documents

    > And that's more than an "ideal" if you have a handheld device with just one
    > hardwired Unicode font built in.

    If you have a hardwired device which uses a single font OK (though such
    devices are unlikely to ever support *all* the scripts in Unicode properly)
    But still if you have a device with one large font in ROM and two characters
    get added for one script you then have to update the whole big font, rather
    than updating a much smaller font for that particular script.

    - Chris



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