Re: FWIW: Danny is fully Unicode!

From: "Herman Miller" <hmiller@...>

> 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.
Aw, I can't help you there man :( I never used Word 2000 in an XP
environment. I have used it while running Windows 98 and Me, but you have to
input Unicode characters manually (even doing your own ligaturization of
Arabic, unless you're running localized Arabic Windows -- but there may be a
fix for that on MS's site), and

> 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).
I forgot about that one... anyway, I recommended Arial Unicide MS because
it's a free download from Microsoft (but you have to use the Download Search
to find it, and it's a 13 meg download that expands to about 22 meg).

Code2000 does have some characters not found in Arial Unicode if I'm not
mistaken -- I remember Ethiopic support.

Another free Unicode font that DOES have full Devanagari etc. support in the
Private Use Area: TITUS Cyberbit; the address is something like
titus.????.de (it's a German university website).

> 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?)
Arial Unicode has Tibetan, but not full ligature support only available in
OpenType, so it doesn't really work for actual Tibetan use. And Win XP
doesn't include Tibetan support (nor does it include Bengali support -- yet)
Too bad, because there's another language I'd like to check out in the
future, especially if/when I do a study of Buddhism I've been planning on.

~Danny~