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

Philip Newton wrote:
> On 3/22/07, Abel Chiaro <pchavesjr+conlang@...> wrote:
>> If at
>> least they had another COMBINING BREVE, suited for uppercase
>> letters... Is
>> there a better way around it?
>
> Unicode characters are abstract notions. What a particular glyph looks
> like is up to the font and the rendering engine.
>
> So from Unicode's point of view, one combining breve is enough. Where
> exactly it is positioned depends on whether the base letter is narrow
> or wide, tall or short, but again, that's a font and/or rendering
> engine issue -- so I'd look there rather than in Unicode for a
> solution.
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.)

The Windows Vista fonts seem to have better support for some of these
features, although I haven't tested them very thoroughly.

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