Hi, Some weeks back there were a number of postings about software for viewing Unicode Ranges in TrueType fonts and I had a few questions about that. Most viewers listed seemed to only check the Unicode Range bits of the fonts which can be misleading in certain cases.
Anyways I wanted to ask the following: for a given, specific language how can you tell if a font supports that language (as opposed to the Unicode Range)? What I have noticed is that some fonts may support a Unicode Range but may have only a few characters from that range and thus cannot really be used for writing in that language. For example, the font Estrangello Edessa supports Unicode Ranges for Arabic and Syriac, but only has glyphs for Arabic numerals (and vowels?), but no glyphs for the Arabic alphabet. It apparently however fully supports the Syriac character set. So I would say that really it only supports Syriac in any practical sense. So If I were to algorithmically search for fonts supporting Arabic by checking the Unicode Subset Range bits, I would assume, mistakenly, this font supports Arabic writing. But if you want to search algorithmically and find fonts that actually support a *language* and not just a partial Unicode Range, how would you do it? I did notice a posting regarding fontconfig: "If you are on a system that uses fontconfig, such as most recent linux distros, you can find out which fonts support a particular language using fc-list; for example:" $ fc-list :lang=ko However, fontconfig apparently compiles in all of its .orth (orthography) files for each supported language so it can do sort of a manual computation of which font supports all the characters in a given .orth file. (Did I get that right?) Short of compiling all this information together manually and searching every font for complete coverage of one of these sets of characters is there another way to go about this? Many thanks for any help here in this baffling world of Unicode, Yours truly, Elisha Berns [EMAIL PROTECTED] tel. (310) 556 - 8332 fax (310) 556 - 2839
