I have had a look, as a new member, at the messages referring to one and unique unicode font, and the main questions and answers, as far as there are answers, regarding the necessity or non-necessity of having at least a unicode font installed in the system, and whether such a unicode font is absolutely necessary; and also whether there should be a monolithic unicode font or a group of fonts which, all together, should make a unicode font. 1. Yes, in our age of communication such a font, or group of fonts, is necessary because you can never know, at professional level, what kind of book/paper/article one can receive via e-mail or floppy. Personally, as a linguist, I currently use West European (inevitably, yes), Central European, Cyrillic and Greek, and - if sending a linguistic paper via e-mail - I must be sure that the recipient can correctly decode what I wrote. What happens if I add some two-three words in Armenian or Georgian or Hebrew...? If the other computer has not the software and font(s) capable of correctly reading this, we revert to the old days when we had to specifically indicate the font(s) used, print the stuff, and add other indications. The problem is the same for other professionals, engineers or mathematicians... 2. There is a problem of choice at the level of software developers how to deal with unicode fonts, i.e. whether to develop a huge, monolithic font or to create groups of font families for each script. More important than this is to be able to know whether the received document may be correctly read, and whether the installed font(s) and software are capable of decryption; if not, a warning should be displayed, something like "the original document uses glyphs not available in your system". But such a warning should be eliminated as it would be frequent indeed. 3. Another problem has been connected to the different font encoding used by the various platforms, mainly Windows and MAC OS (I do not know how Linux looks like); this was A BIG PROBLEM, seemingly on the way to be solved by MAC OS X which, as I could see, offers reasonable compatibility with Windows (testing may be only limited now, as MAC OS X is still incomplete; its claimed 'full unicode' capabilities are rather theoretical, but this is seemingly a problem of weeks/months to be solved). Well, the only reasonable cross-platform font encoding/decoding solution is via unicode, and this seems to be implemented this year. 4. Nobody uses indeed all the glyphs of all the languages and conventional symbols of the world, but revert to 1, and you find that at least one unicode font/groups of fonts is/are necessary. Everson Mono for MAC OS X SERVER seems a good solution, unfortunately it does not seem to work with MAC OS X (at least I couldn't, if you can provide help, please do). I think that software developers should have in mind a solution for TWO unicode fonts/groups of unicode fonts: a Swiss type and a serif type. If various people need more, this may be done locally or specifically for the scripts in view. 5. For sure, there still are glyphs not included in the last Unicode 3.1 version; as I could note, Glagolitic is missing, and I think some specific fonts used in the various Old Church Slavonic texts are also missing (I shall make an analysis at our university, and revert with solutions). There are also the Neolithic graphemes of southeast Europe, the earliest proof of sacred writing in southeast Europe, maybe the earliest in the world. I tried to map them, and am ready to send the data to anyone interested. The students at UCLA are perhaps familiar with them as late Marija Gimbutas and Shan Winn worked on this for years. Dr. Sorin Paliga University of Bucharest Slavic Dept [EMAIL PROTECTED]
