> From: Michael Diehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > ... > What I'm not clear on is how the font issue is handled. > > For example, if a user enters a bunch of Chinese text on their mac, > then we try to display this on a Spanish version of XP. Is this > going to work out of the box? Or do I need to worry about what font > the data was entered in, vs. what font it's going to be displayed in.
The underlying text will work but displaying it may not. You will want to make sure that whatever font you display the text with supports the characters in the text. Some systems support a "fallback" scheme, and in many cases simply using "System" will do the trick -- but not 100% of the time for every possible character. It depends a lot on the text you plan to use. > I've read about "pan-unicode" fonts (a font that contains ALL glyphs > for all languages) -- great idea, but do they exist? Yes, they exist but generally as extras/add-ons -- not included in base installations of most popular operating systems. I have been personally involved in building several such fonts; the most notable being Arial Unicode MS which supports virtually all of the characters in Unicode 2.1. I can give you more info about this and other such fonts; please contact me off-list if you are interested. Shipping a font (and installing it) with your app is a good way to guarantee a way for your text to be displayed exactly as you want; however, if you intend to do so, be aware that most licenses to font data (end-user licenses) prohibit you from giving the data to anyone else without additional licensing. > I guess the alternative would be to handle the text as some sort of > RTF, then give the user guidance as to what fonts should / should not > be used? How the text is encoded doesn't really matter. Displaying it the way you want depends on how much burden you want to put on the user and how much they're willing to tolerate. Depending on how much you want to assume about the user's system and what kind of text is involved, you may be able to come up with your own scheme (e.g. if text=spanish and OS=Windows then use font "Arial", and so on) that will get the text to display well in most cases, just using system-installed fonts. You'll have to do a little investigation in terms of which fonts support which scripts/characters, etc. on each of the platforms involved. Josh _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
