Re: Latin font support in Windows (was Re: First post: presenting Classical Alyis)

On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:20:27 -0500, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

>Philip Newton wrote:
>According to SIL
>(http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=UniscribeVersions&_sc=1),
>support for Latin scripts has only been in Uniscribe (Microsoft's text
>system) since Windows XP SP2, which is relatively recent. Fonts created
>before that time aren't very likely to support glyph positioning for
>combining breves (unless they were designed for some other application
>that did support those features), and even more recent fonts won't
>necessarily support them unless the font designer went to the trouble of
>adding the extra tables. (If I can figure out how they work, I'd like to
>add some of these features to Thryomanes 1.4. But Thryomanes 1.3 only
>has a few ligature tables for phonetic symbols, and earlier versions
>didn't have any special OpenType features at all.)
Indeed. I have just tested this on MediaWiki to very disappointing results;
in fact the font engine in KWord, OpenOffice.org and Firefox didn't do very
well... GTK 2.0, however, works great — that is, depending on the font —,
while Qt had some quirks with a couple fonts that have this support. I still
have to test that on Windows, but, since it doesn't work everywhere as I'd
expect, I'll stick with the precomposed characters at hand.

>The Windows Vista fonts seem to have better support for some of these
>features, although I haven't tested them very thoroughly.
If you mean Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, Segoe
Print, Segoe Script and Segoe UI, most of them work great on Qt, and IIRC
all of them are displayed correctly on GTK. Again, I have yet to test those
on Windows.

(I guess the default romanization for Ályis (or rather Ánvalyis) will have
to use acutes...)

Cheers,
- Abel.