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