On Thu, 7 Nov 2002 10:40:48 -0600 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > You're assuming there is a problem. If I send you a document and I > wanted it to display in Comic Sans but you don't have that font on > your system, so you end up seeing it in, say, Arial, does that merit a > dialog box?
Depends. For a home user who doesn't care about fonts, it doesn't. For someone who cares, it does. If I am interested in some information, I don't like if I can't get it just because someone couldn't imagine it was a problem. > As for providing a > notification dialog to say that the text contains < c, ZWJ, t > but > that the font doesn't support it, there are no existing mechanisms to > support that at present, I don't understand this. Since a font doesn't "do" anything, but software using the font does, one could write a rendering engine which gives feedback about how well it could complete its job, and a typesetting application might elect to make use of that feedback and provide a notification dialog or whatever. BTW, as the information about available glyphs in a font is independent of character encoding, I don't see the relevance of this whole discussion to this list. > but it hasn't been demonstrated that there really is any > need, and I really don't expect vendors will be hearing too many > complaints from users. That's no reason. Just because many people don't need a feature, or maybe just don't care enough to complain, doesn't mean it shouldn't be provided for those who do need it. I could well imagine that in a typesetting application, it would make sense to be informed on whether a certain typographic feature can or cannot be applied. Carefully checking a long document for whether, e.g., a certain pair of glyphs does form a ligature where it is supposed to is tedious and error-prone if done by a human, but such routine tasks are what computers are good at. Cheers, Thomas -- Thomas Lotze [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
