Are there fonts fully compliant with MES-2 anyway, given that these MES subsets are now left unmaintained, and that MES-3 is just an open container with no strict definition, with which fonts can comply only for a predesignated Unicode version?
Shouldn't there instead exist standard sets per language/country for internationalization (I know that ICU integrates data about language coverage, but it is still not a standard, even if some of its data are being integrated into the new Unicode-hosted CLDR project)?
To support all E.U. official languages, it would just be needed to support the union of these subsets per language. For font designers, it would be also a simplification, because fonts could more clearly be labelled to cover languages rather than character subsets.
It's a shame that users can't simply select their prefered fonts according to languages they cover (and also probably an opportunity for extensions in the OpenType or similar font formats); for web browsers, this would also allow better automatic selection of fonts to use if HTML documents are properly specifying the language of text sections they contain (as they should with the lang="?" attribute and with the xml:lang="?" attribute in XHTML).
Selection of fonts per script is a nightmare for most users, because fonts don't always cover all the needed subset for a language, producing partial rendering or inconvenient/horrible rendering with multiple font designs with various metrics.
Just think about how you select the prefered font for "Unicode" encoded documents in their browsers... Users will probably select Arial Unicode MS or Lucida Console if they have these fonts, but will then be able to display reliable only European languages in Latin/Greek/Cyrillic or modern Hebrew/Arabic scripts, without having any way to support also other languages that DO need the Unicode encoding, in absence of other suitable charsets.
Some good examples: Georgian, Armenian are not covered by those Unicode fonts, as well as many letters of the new ISO 8859 Latin Celtic standard set created by Michael Anderson, and even some Latin-based African languages widely spoken and written in Europe like Berber, are not covered correctly with those "Unicode" fonts so authors need to create documents with too many text encoding hacks (like the inclusion of Greek approximative similar letters, or specific style markup for only a few letters).
----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Well, of course if you are using languages which use only characters from WGL4, you will use only these characters. So I could only understand your recommendation as being to write only in languages which are supported by WGL4, and not in other languages. And in practice that means, use only European languages.
