Dan Kogai <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >On 2002.02.15, at 06:36, Markus Kuhn wrote: >> Markus >> (XFree86 -misc-fixed-* font maintainer) > > Oh yes here comes Mr. Font! > >> You will find that many of the -misc-fixed-*-iso10646-1 fonts have >> better coverage than Unifont. In particular, the fonts 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, >> 9x18, 10x20 cover the MES-3 repertoire of Unicode 3.0 completely, which >> covers all IPA glyphs.
You may well have drawn them in those cell sizes - but X font names would be easier to experiment with. >>Unifont doesn't and it's combining characters >> won't work with xterm either, which is particularly important for IPA. When working with western scripts it is common to use bold and italic to make things stand out. Now I can imagine that italic/oblique of asian characters may not make sense - but how do users of such scripts make the "standout" distinction - colour? Be that as it may - to present western text in the normal manner it would be useful to be able to rely on there being a bold (screen) and to a lesser extent an italic (print) version of a particular font. I would like to make this "easy" (e.g. in perl/Tk's Text widget), so user says I want 14-point font - I want there to be a (set of) font(s) for normal/bold/italic - now in certain spots in the codepoint space those will be pointing at same X font - as there is no alternative. What is a pain is if user then changes to 16-point font which sub-ranges exist tend to change. So a lot of tedious probing of fonts occurs and things get horribly slow. This is what TrueType fonts score - if you can find one that looks reasonable at typical size and has the right repertoire you "know" that all sizes will _exist_ - they may look naff if user chooses 11pt or some odd size - but if they do they will not do that. Right now I think Unicode fonts are about where ASCII fonts were in early '80s - okay for "tty mode" but seriously lacking for anything that approaches modern "Word Processing". >The problem is definitely font. > I wonder if there are free, scalable 'reference font' that contains >all major languages. So far, -misc-fixed-*-iso10646-1 seems the only >one that comes close to that but it is not scalable. MS Arial comes >close too but you need Win(2k|XP). Hiragino on MacOS X is beautiful but >missing too many non-Japanese fonts to be a reference (besides it is not >free). > I want for example > >* Reference Serif Font (Times Unicode?) I prefer that style for printed matter (high resolution), but dislike them for typical screen resolutions. >* Reference Serif Font (Helvetica Unicode?) I like those on screen - except for the fact that I (Capital I) and l (lowercase L) tend to look identical. Helvetica/Arial/Lucida all suffer the same. >* Reference Fixed Width (Misc TT? Courier Unicode? Monaco Unicode?) Fixed width -c- (and/or monospaced -m- ) makes life easy for editors. But don't look very natural. > > that are free and open. I know both Apple and MS have enough to make >such fonts. I wonder why they don't contribute in this simple way (One >of the reasons that makes me doubt how serious they are about >Unicode/ISO10646).... Adobe could do it as well. What Unicode fonts need is the equivalent of their Helvetica/Time/Courier Medium/Bold Roman/Italic 12-font set of PostScript-1 printers. SIL (www.sil.org) also have a reasonable starting point. > >Dan the Man with Too Many *.(ttf|ttc|otf|bdf) to browse -- Nick Ing-Simmons http://www.ni-s.u-net.com/
