On 30/06/2004 11:18, busmanus wrote:
Peter Kirk wrote:
If you prefer to use precomposed characters
I need to use them at the moment, because my word processor does not support the trickier aspects of rendering combined glyphs (e.g. making use of the "corner points", etc.). I can't even make it use a precomposed ligature for a letter+combining diacritical combination. Can you recommend anything more advanced in this respect (if it doesn't qualify as an ad)?
I'm not sure I quite understand your problem.
If your word processor displays Unicode characters at all, it should display precomposed glyphs like the ones in the Extended Greek block - unless the word processor has built-in canonical decomposition, which seems improbable. I see from your message source that you are using Windows 98. On that system you should have no problem displaying Extended Greek in the built-in Wordpad, or with Microsoft Word (but this is not a Microsoft ad!) or (free) Open Office.
But your system will not do a good job of rendering decomposed characters. It will neither combine them programmatically nor replace them with precomposed character glyphs. For proper rendering of decomposed characters you really need to upgrade to Office 2003 on Windows 2000 or XP. This is a good reason to use the precomposed characters instead.
Ken Whistler's recommendation to use decomposed characters, which is probably only a personal one, does not make good sense at the present time with your particular system setup. In fact I am not sure when there would ever be a significant advantage in decomposed characters, as long as there is a precomposed font available. A perfect system would level the playing field by processing and rendering the two alternatives identically, making it essentially irrelevant which you choose.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
