Is Microsoft conquering the world?! (Re: Orthographies with lotsa diacritics)

As I watch my Astros prepare to beat the Braves (Rocker sux), Kristian
wrote:

>I was just surfing the web and found a site that claims to have
>fonts for the whole world:
>
>http://www.linguistsoftware.com/language.htm
Awesome!  I've been looking for a site like that.

But I got some scary news, and yes it concerns the evil empire known as
Microsoft.  I asked a while ago if anybody had Unicode fonts for Indic
scripts, and if anybody had the Arial Unicode font.  Well folks, anybody
with uses Windows 95 and better, you can get this HUGE (21 meg, 13 zipped as
a .exe file) for free.  Not to mentioned a few more.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com and visit the Download Center, do a keyword
search in Windows 95/98/NT 4.0/2000, using the keyword "font".  You can then
download Arial Unicode MS, and also a bunch of other popular MS fonts in
their latest version (most can work with Cent. European, Greek, Cyrillic,
Baltic and Turkish), and these are good fonts -- like Book Antiqua,
Haettenschweiler, Garamond, Verdana, Comic Sans and Tw Cent (the font used
for the logo for the board game Monopoly, another favorite classic).  They
are there just so that anybody that has Office 97 or any of its components
can upgrade their fonts to accomodate the Euro currency symbol (€, or C with
= superimposed).  Even though they're supposed to be installed alongside
Office 97/2000 and Publisher 98/2000, you do NOT have to have any kind of
Office, Publisher, Word, Excel or anything.  These fonts are free for the
download, no strings attached.

Also, if you search under Windows 95 (not the others), you can download
Tahoma32.exe, which is Tahoma and Tahoma Bold 2.60.  These fonts are pretty
ample, and it's a nice compact and readable sans serif font which I prefer
far over Arial or MS Sans Serif.  It comes complete with Latin-1, Latin
Extended-A (Pan-European), Greek (modern), Cyrillic (the "Russian 32"
characters plus extras for Serbian, Makedonian, Bulgarian, Ukranian and
Belarussian), a few Cyrillic extensions (the Ukranian "true ge", with
upturned topbar, Azeri ticked letters, and other Central Asian usages,
Hebrew, Arabic plus Persian additions, and Thai.  (Then you got extended
punctuation, mathematical, dingbats, box/block symbols...)

Arial Unicode MS, on the other hand is one scary mama.  You can use it as a
pan-Asian font since it contains all the characters for Japanese, Korean,
Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.  (If you use IE5, you can
install Asian language support for one, two, three or all of these, which
come with specifically-created fonts -- this takes more hard drive space,
but these are smaller fonts individually; GulimChe, used for Korean, is only
about 6 meg and the others are smaller.  If you use Netscape, you gotta
download Bitstream Cyberbit from their FTP trees at ftp://ftp.netscape.com.)

Arial Unicode supplants -- by a mile and a half -- Lucida Sans Unicode.  It
contains all Latin (Latin-1, Latin Ext. A and B, and Latin Additional),
Greek (plus Coptic!) and Greek Extended, Cyrillic and Cyrillic Extended (now
you're dealing with everything from Abkhaz to Yakut), Armenian, Hebrew,
Arabic, Arabic Extended and Arabic Presentation Forms(and now you got Urdu
retroflexes, Pashto letters and even the HUGE abjad used for Sindhi),
Devanagari (YES, FINALLY!!), Bengali, Gurmukhi (used for Punjabi spoken by
Sikhs as opposed to Muslim Punjabi), Oriya, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu,
Kannada, Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Vietnamese precomposed (see Latin Additional),
and Georgian (YES, FINALLY AGAIN!!).  I mean, this has every single
character in the Unicode 2.1 database.  (Could a Unicode 3 font be in the
works?!  ¿Could we be seeing Syriac, Sinhala, Khmer, Ge'ez, Cherokee and
Canadian Syllabics before too long?)

By the way, if you have Arial Unicode MS plus the fonts provided with
installed East Asian support, like GulimChe, MS Song, MingLiu, you can set
Arial Unicode as your proportional font and one of the others for monospace.

By the way, I am in NO WAY affiliated with Microsoft, Inc.  I'm just a font
nut.

DaW.
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