Whether a novel or a lecture, what Smokey Ardisson writes here is really interesting! Thanks for looking into the quesion of font display and checking that website.
However, does what you say explain why, although I could not see the Tibetan text properly in Camino, I could see it in Safari? Although Alan Wood's explanation of Unicode in the link you provided was also interesting and his webpages claimed to have been updated in 2005, in fact he was only referring to Mac OS 9, and OS X doesn't get mentioned, so it's hard to know what to make of it. I can see some of the Tibetan on his unicode chart, but not all. What I'm trying to get at is - does the difficulty lie with Mac OS in general or with Camino in particular or, of course, with the way I have set things up? At least it's nice to know that things will only get better! Ruth >Since you provided a website here, I took a look at it :-) > >The site you provided <http://www.learntibetan.net/helpfont.htm> is written in >such a way that requires using an old, non-standard, pre-Unicode font*, which >is pretty dodgy these days. The web and its browsers are moving rapidly to a >Unicode-based model, away from legacy standards and certainly away from >non-standards random fonts like those employed by this website. > >That said, the issue here doesn't seem to be a hole in Gecko's support for >certain scripts as I mentioned in July. It seems Gecko is simply failing to >recognize the "TibetanMachineWeb" font and is only recognizing the >"TibetanMachineWeb1" font (the downloaded font file consists of 10 separate >fonts inside). It may be bug 246527 ><https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246527> (which does seem to >strike non-Roman languages disproportionately) or it might be a bug in the way >the fonts were made. > >>That if I want to look at any of the websites that might, just might, be >>using those Tibetan fonts (or presumably any of a great variety of other >>language fonts), then I had better be using another browser? That's a real >>disappointment! Is there any hope on the horizen? > >There are two pieces of good news. First, it seems like Gecko does a decent >job handling real, standards-compliant Unicode Tibetan, at least as far as I >can tell from Alan Wood's test page ><http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/tibetan.html>. So sites that are done using >Unicode Tibetan should work. With respect to other languages and scripts, >generally the holes are pretty small, like not being able to set certain fonts >as default in the preferences or some characters showing up in another font >(but as the right character). The worst case, as far as I'm aware, is the >support for South Asian languages; Gecko on Mac OS X currently can't do the >glyph reordering that's required (it needs ATSUI). And probably Mongolian, >since it requires contextual shaping like Arabic AND is written >vertically--but that's a challenge for everyone yet! > >Second, and more generally, the next big step for Gecko on Mac OS X is to a >new, modern architecture for graphics and text-rendering. No more QuickDraw, >no more whatever we're using for text now (maybe QuickDraw for that, too); >hello Quartz and ATSUI (the same text drawing routines used in Safari and most >of the OS, with really top-notch support even for less-common scripts. It's >just slow unless you feed it text in a certain way, which Gecko's not set up >to do yet.) After the latest series of releases come out, Josh will be locked >in a closet and made to develop lots of this new code. Or something like >that; obviously Mike and Simon and Josh are the ones to ask here :-) > >Sorry, you didn't ask for a novel (or a lecture), but I'm afraid my reply has >become one, if not both :-( I hope I was at least somewhat informative rather >than confusing and answered your questions. > >Smokey > >* In Unicode, every character in each of the world's writing systems has its >own "codepoint", so each can be written and shared unambiguously across the >Internet (and all on the same webpage, if one wanted). Prior to that, people >often made fonts where the replaced the Roman characters with the ones from >another writing system, so that the codepoint for, say, a, was used for the >Hebrew letter aleph. In pages which specified that particular font, text >appeared as the author intended, but the actual text itself was gibberish in >Roman letters. Not good for unambiguous interoperability and data exchange, >because proper understanding depended on appearance, and appearance depended >on the author and all recipeints having the same non-standard font. And some >other, more complex issues :-) This was particularly common for "less common" >languages and writing systems, but Mac OS versions before 8.5 or 9 did it for >Greek (with the Symbol font). >_______________________________________________ >Camino mailing list >[email protected] >http://mozdev.org/mailman/listinfo/camino _______________________________________________ Camino mailing list [email protected] http://mozdev.org/mailman/listinfo/camino
