Peter R. Mueller-Roemer <pmr at informatik dot uni dash frankfurt dot de> wrote:
> The Unicode-Standard I hope is Open in the sense that any font that is > designed to this standard may call itself a unicode-font (complete or > partial ...). > > Unicode has a great potential to remove the language-specific > boundaries from web-communication, but if allmost equivalent fonts (& > SW to read, write and print) are not freely available for private use, > than its accepance will not be so wide as is necessary to enable > multi-lingual communication! As far as I can tell, nothing in the Unicode Standard requires the use of particular font or display-engine technologies. This is an important point for me too. However, neither the Unicode Consortium nor WG2 has any control over the names, licensing restrictions, or prices that vendors give to their products that implement Unicode, even if those vendors are Consortium members. Fonts and display engines are supposed to do the best job they can of rendering Unicode text, and must not claim to support characters or features that they do not actually support. As long as I am free to choose (or invent) another technology that does this, I am under no obligation to use OpenType or AAT or Uniscribe or any vendor's IP in order to have a compliant Unicode system. As far as the word "open" is concerned, vendors are free to use ordinary English words to name their products, with very few constraints. (I think in the US, the word "new" can only be used to apply to a product that is one year old or less; that's one of the few exceptions.) I would suggest taking the word "open," as applied to software, about as literally as we currently take the phrase "user-friendly." It carries no binding promises, and vendors are not obligated to agree on what it means. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
