Re: CHAT: Reformed Latin-script writing for natlangs

> Herman Miller wrote:
>
> > Hmm.... It looks like Netscape's using the precomposed characters
that
> > already exist in the font. The Code2000 font doesn't do anything
special in
> > Word. (Windows 98, Word 2000). My Thryomanes font, which doesn't
have any
> > special support for ligatures, also shows column 2 and 3 as
identical
> > (Netscape Communicator 4.72).
I checked out the Code2000 font myself.  I wasn't that impressed, and
for several reasons:
1) OpenType Properties told me that the font cannot be embedded due to
license restrictions,
2) There are no bold or italic variants,
3) CJK fonts are easily available for IE 5.x (or maybe IE 4!) users, and
Netscape has the Bitstream Cyberbit fonts (all 3) in its FTP directory
(somewhere...)
4) Unicode is not widely used outside of Europe, the Americas, the Far
East (CJK-using countries) and Australia.  It is used to a limited
degree in Israel for Hebrew, the Arabic countries, Iran (for Farsi),
Thailand and Viêt Nam.  But as far as I know, Unicode is irrelevant in
India, for instance.  India for the most part uses 8-bit fonts according
to their own 8-bit conventions, or they just speak English (the de facto
lingua franca in India for interstate use, even though the government is
working to replace English with Hindi).  Same goes for Georgia or
Armenia, or Laos or
5) The appearance of the Armenian, Georgian, Devanagari and other
characters were unimpressive.  The 8-bit fonts that can be downloaded
from Yamada or Dr. Berlin's site for the most part looks much better.
(Except for Parsziba.  Jeez, that's one UGLY Persian font!  A similar
font style for Arabic/Persian/Urdu is Mudir, which is nice and bold, and
much more attractive.  My favorite APU font.)
6) Where's Bengali?  Last time I checked, Bengali is spoken by as many
people as Hindi-Urdu.  And Assamese misses out too.  Not every font is
represented in this; there are clear gaps.  (I have to give them credit
for including the Syriac font though.  But it only includes Estrangelo,
not the modern "Nestorian" script used by Assyrians today.)

I give a grade of C for this font, and mostly because the designer
worked pretty hard on this; they did include CJK characters after all.
But what can be accomplished with this one font, can be easily done with
several 8-bit fonts and one's own preferred encoding conventions.
Embedded fonts are a great feature (I just wish I knew how to do that in
HTML documents).  And I know of a GREAT Unicode font for Ge'ez
(Ethiopic) script, which also comes with three 8-bit fonts to accomodate
all the alphasyllabrics.  They're on Daniel Yaqob's Abyssinia Cyber
Gateway at:
http://www.abyssiniacybergateway.net/index.html
The TrueType fonts themselves are at:
ftp://ftp.geez.org/pub/fonts/TrueType/
To these fonts, I give an A.

DaW.