From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2008 - 09:12:34 CDT
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
> Not sure if others had spotted it already on the Unicode website
> about a week ago, but at
> http://www.unicode.org/policies/lastresortfont_eula.html you can find
> the last resort font.
The idea looks cool, and useful too. The font is only 1 megabyte when
packed, 5 megabytes when unpacked. (It might be useful to mention this
on the page.)
The page has <title>Last Resort Font EULA</title>, which is somewhat
misleading, since it's a page about the font in general, just with the
EULA appearing too. So e.g. <title>The Last Resort font and its
EULA</title> would be better. (The EULA is in a separately scrollable
window at the bottom, which is irritating and rather pointless here,
when it appears at the end of a page. Besides, it implies that on
printing, the EULA is truncated.)
I think the idea could be explained a little more, since there is now
some ambiguity and uncertainty. The idea as I understand it is to
provide a glyph for every Unicode code position, using a generic symbol
(a symbol suggesting the general nature of the code position, such as
"Latin letter" or "noncharacter") together with additional information
in "fine print". This means that it should only be used as a "backup"
font.
Even if this will be clarified, I'm still puzzled by the technicalities.
The LastResort font does not seem to behave like a normal font. For
example, in MS Word's font list, it appears as a sequence of A's in
boxes, which is understandable (in a way) but confusing. If I try to
change the font of a piece of text to LastResort, it won't change. In
WordPad, it changes. If I copy the text to Word, it stays in LastResort.
Is this due to some special treatment of fonts in MS Word? If I have
text in Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters in WordPad and I change the
font to LastResort, the Latin letters turn to the LastResort Glyph but
the other letters are unaffected.
I'm afraid some guidance on the intended use and typical problems in it
is needed to make LastResort really useful.
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 10 2008 - 09:16:03 CDT