From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Arcane Jill
>You misunderstand me. Whilst I have no objection to paying for ADDED value, I'm >talking about what comes built in, out of the box. So, out of the box, Windows XP does not support (e.g.) Sinhalese, or ship with Sinhalese fonts. And so, if the next version of Windows does include support for Sinhalese and perhaps even ships with one or more Sinhalese fonts, that will be added value, right? >Consider the literary equivalent... I don't think your analogy is all that great. But the point is that Microsoft has never made any claim that Windows XP supports all of Unicode 4.0. If you want to know what portions of Unicode Microsoft *does* claim that Windows XP supports, see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/winxp.mspx. >You see, I'm not talking about "good" fonts, just "basic" fonts. In fact, any fonts. Essentially, I expect every character to display, albeit poorly, but to display. I expect the operating system to provide a fallback font for every character. The Macintosh does exactly this. Windows doesn't. That's all. If Windows XP includes (say) a Sinhalese font and is able to display a nominal glyph for each Sinhalese character but cannot shape it correctly, you might be content, but there will be far more people complaining that MS gives the impression that they support Sinhalese but that it's full of bugs. Apple has included a fallback font that shows (if there's no font for, say, Sinhalese) for a given character what Unicode range it is from (in my example, U+0D80..U+0DFF). No more. That is a small bit of value that they have added that MS has not. Last time I heard, they do *not* provide fonts covering all of Unicode 4.0 (with the nominal glyphs for each character, or full shaping support), just as MS or Sun or any other platform vendor does not. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
