Re: FWIW: Danny is fully Unicode!

On Thu, 2 May 2002 08:01:03 -0500, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>I've mentioned a few times I have Word 2002 running on a Windows XP Home
>system, giving me great powers to create Unicode documents! I have plenty of
>fonts for that sorta thing, and I have both the great and small "Unicode
>fonts" (Arial Unicode MS and Lucida Unicode). I also have a bunch of
>Arabic/Persian/Urdu fonts, and Win XP automatically connects the characters
>for me, even including the many ligatures included in fonts like Traditional
>Arabic and Courier New (the later versions with Hebrew and Arabic support).
>If I plug in (Alef-) Lam-Lam-Heh, I get the Allah glyph.
How does Word 2002 compare with Word 2000 as far as support for Devanagari,
Tamil, and other complex scripts? I've been working on a Devanagari
keyboard for Keyman 5.0, and I've noticed that Word 2000 has numerous
problems with spacing and display of ligatures (unlike Wordpad, for
instance). But when you save and reopen a file, it corrects itself. (On the
other hand, it introduces new errors, which I've mentioned before,
involving things like the IPA tie bar, which is pretty much unusable due to
this bug.) I just upgraded to Word 2000 not long ago, but if Word 2002 is
significantly improved, I might give it a try.

Also check out the Code2000 font (http://home.att.net/~jameskass/): it's
$5.00 shareware, but that's not much to ask for something so useful (I'm
gradually converting my Ludireo etymologies to use it in place of all the
miscellaneous pre-Unicode fonts I was using before).

>What's more: I have OpenType fonts for Devanagari, Tamil and other Indic
>scripts, but that's not much help for anyone not running Windows 2000 or XP.
Do you happen to know of any good Tibetan fonts? Arial Unicode MS doesn't
handle subscripts or vowel marks; it just spaces them out like normal
spacing characters. (Or is that also just a shortcoming of Word 2000?)

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