This may be the fault of the application not Windows. Many Windows applications do not take advantage of the support for Unicode, OpenType layout, and font linking which is present in Windows 2000 & XP.
It's plain silly to expect support for every Unicode character to be present on every platform and in every application "right out of the box" soon after characters are officially encoded in the Unicode Standard, especially characters for scripts have complex rendering requirements. Fonts for some scripts can take a long time to make properly, and then they have to be tested. Layout engines may need updating and these have to be thoroughly tested too. Then applications need to be updated to handle proper line breaking, word selection and so on. Things like math formulas may and music notation have their own special layout requirements - there is not much point of simply producing a font with "basic" glyphs for the characters if they cannot be rendered properly in formulas or music notation. - Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: Arcane Jill To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 5:07 PM Subject: RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ? 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. Consider the literary equivalent. Suppose I went to a library and borrowed a book, took it home, and attempted to read it (the real world equivalent of viewing a web page). Suppose then, that instead of readable characters, a critical math formula was printed as a series of "unsupported character" glyphs, and that subsequent exploration revealed that the book could only be read if I, the reader (not the publisher), were to pay money to the font designer. I would feel (rightly, I think) aggrieved. 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. Jill
