Re: Unicode 3.0

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, R. Nierse wrote:

> > Rob writes:
> > >>>
> > Since I've been looking for fonts I ancountered the word Unicode. What is
> > it? How can I get all those neat scripts like Thaana and (especially)
> > Mongolian vertical script?
> > <<<
> >
> > To answer this question in "laymans terms":
>
> Thank you for your explanation. So no free easy to obtain fonts ...
> >
> >
> > I cannot publicly condone simply ripping off the example images and
> bodging
> > together your own TTF, even if it would be strictly for personal use.
> It's
> > tempting, though, isn't it...?
> >
> Yes it is tempting!, And no, you couldn't do that!
> Could you?
>
I can do that, and I would, but it'd take an enormous amount of time,
just to produce, say, one font per codepage. And then you haven't
got the problem of Arabic mutating signs, Burmese wander-around
diacritics or Tibetan vertically-stacking ligatures solved. Without some
OS-implementation of Unicode, you still haven't got anything useful.
You not only need a font to render the characters, you also need a
program that uses Unicode to store the texts you type, and you need
an intelligent way of typing Unicode. That means input method editors
for scripts like Hanzi, and keyboard mappings for the rest.

There are several free fonts available that implement a goodish portion
of Unicode, not to mention the Cyberbit font, which has all the Chinese
characters, too, but is 10 mb, and virtually unusable (and no longer
'officially' available. It's even too large to rip apart with a
font editor. I, too, think that the Unicode consortium should provide
reference implementations of fonts for the whole range.

If you've got money, you can buy unicode components for Windows, and
integrate them in your own VB programs. Windows NT is supposed to be
Unicode through-and-through, and Word 97 ditto. But just try to enter
a short text in IPA...  You could also buy a Mac, and have something
that's said to work out of the box. (Never used it myself). If you have
enough fonts and don't need anything too comfortable in the matter of
editors, you can use Unix/X11 and Yudit, and produce and print plain
Unicode texts, and Unicode HTML pages. If you don't mind some seriously
complicated way of working, you could try Omega, the Unicode version
of TeX.

In December KDE 1.89 will come out, which uses Qt 2.0 internally,
which uses Unicode for all text, and there appear to be input methods
included, too. I will migrate Kura (ob. status: busy with the redesign
of the n-tier database access object model for 100% buzzword compliance)
to KDE 1.89 as soon as possible. I really have high hopes of KDE 2.

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt