You have to note that for a good quality rendering, you'd better get fonts specifically made for a subset of Unicode repertoire instead of pan-Unicode fonts. Google 'alan wood unicode fonts' and you'll get Alan Wood's Unicode font site. For Latin, you definitely need to install Bitstream Vera series
(donated by Bitstream). If you're also interested in Greek and
Cyrillic, a set of fonts made available by SIL (Gentium) are good to have.
In the Mozilla font preferences you can set font preferences for Unicode, as well as for specific languages like Western, Japanese, etc. Am I then correct in assuming that the language-specific preferences always take priority over the Unicode preferences? Even when displaying a Web page which has "charset=utf-8" in the headers? In other words is there a mechanism (inside Mozilla) that says
- hmm... I have to display the character with number 49436 (hex C11C) here. - this character is in the range of Korean syllables. - now has a language-specific Korean font been specified? If so IÂll use it. - If not, I use the Unicode font (Bitstream Cyberbit, or whatever).
In other words, are huge "complete Unicode" fonts like Bitstream Cyberbit or Arialuni (which I promise not to try to use again..) only used for filling in the gaps where there are no language-specific fonts available? There does not seem to be much point in having them, then?
Another question: does Mozilla consider 'Latin Extended A' characters like Å (o with macron) to be 'Western'? Many Western fonts (like Times New Roman) have them and display them fine. But for instance Bitstream Vera Serif does not have them, and some other font (I donÂt know which) is substituted. Which rules are used for this substitution? Does mozilla look for them in *another* Western font, or does it look in the 'Unicode' font?
Mozilla's international release notes is your friend although we didn't give gory details in the document. In Mozilla, goto 'Help' and 'Release Notes'. In the release notes web page, follow the link to 'international known issues'. Basically, there are two different versions of Mozilla for Linux and three
different ways for printing.
Thanks very much for pointing this out. I had found out about the three print mechanisms by trial & error, but this makes it much clearer.
As regards to printing: I have (and have had for years) just 'lprng' and 'magicfilter' to print on my old Laserjet IIP. Also xprint works with that (as far as it works). Is there any point for me (or in general for users wanting a 100 % Unicode system) in switching to CUPS?
Regards, Jan
-- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
