At 09:37 14/08/02 +0430, Roozbeh Pournader wrote: >And it's also a reason for why a compatiblity decomposition is needed for >it. When some piece of modern software doesn't find it in an older font, >it can display it as its decomposition.
No, it can't. (1) Most software doesn't know what characters exist in any particular font that the user happens to have chosen, and it doesn't want to know. This is straightforward modular software design: some part of the *operating system* is responsible for fonts, rendering, etc. (2) Even if you had software that did laboriously check every character in every font, it wouldn't be able to use the compatibility decomposition because it wouldn't know it existed... until it, itself, had first been updated with new Unicode tables. By which time the user might as well have loaded the new fonts. How many word processors in common use are *incapable* of including graphics in their documents? I use Word 2.0, and it has that feature, and I use it the whole time: for example, for my signature. Unless there is a large installed user base of pre-1992 software, using a simple graphic would work; and would have the advantage of instant implementation on every platform with no reprogramming.
