> An adequate proposal for a complex script should surely include a proper > account of the script behaviour and sample glyphs of presentation forms. > And so such a proposal should include all that is needed for a > developer, and is available some time before the new script is > officially standardised.
There may be a few samples of presentation forms & conjuncts in a proposal - but I've yet to see a proposal for Indic script that contains a comprehensive set of all the presentation forms required to render all text written in that script. Character encoding proposals for complex scripts do not contain sufficient information for a developer to write rules for a layout engine for the script or enough information for a type designer to develop a font for the script. If such information were a requirement I suspect a number of scripts that have already been encoded in the standard would not be there yet. > >If you code chart type glyphs are enough for you then on Windows if you have MS > >Office there is always Arial Unicode. > Except that this font is stuck at Unicode 2.something. Or is there any > sign of an update? The version I have on my machine dated 03 June 1999 does contain characters added with Unicode 3.0 though I haven't checked to see if all characters added with Unicode 3.0 are all there. I also haven't looked at later versions, including the one shipped with Office 2003 - maybe it has been updated. - Chris
