It's not clear to me what you're asking, or why you are asserting that "there is no way to show Unicode contents on Windows". All text display in Windows uses Unicode. To my knowledge, Windows 8 has built-in text display support that covers more of Unicode than any other widely-available OS, and it is being extended in Windows 8.1, available in preview now.
Scripts supported in Windows 8.1 include: - Europe & Mideast scripts: Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syriac - East / North Asian scripts: Han, Hiragana, Katakana, Korean (including Old Hangul conjoining jamo), Lisu, Mongolian, Yi - South Asian scripts: Bangla, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thaana, Tibetan - Southeast Asian scripts: Buginese, Javanese, Khmer, Lao, Myanmar, New Tai Lue, Ol Chiki, Sora Sompeng, Tai Le, Thai - African scripts: Ethiopic, N'Ko, Osmanya, Tifinagh, Vai - North American scripts: Canadian Syllabics, Cherokee, Deseret - Archaic scripts (various regions): Coptic, Glagolitic, Gothic, Meroitic Cursive, Ogham, Old Italic, Orkhon, Phags-pa, Runic - Other: Braille, broad symbol coverage (including color emoji font support) Many people running older versions of Windows aren't aware of the level of Unicode support. You can find details spanning versions since Windows 2000 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688099.aspx For simple scripts that do not require shaping that are not yet supported, if you have the font and can select the font in your app, then text in those scripts can be displayed. Of course, we don't have built-in font fallback for such scripts. Peter -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ilya Zakharevich Sent: July 9, 2013 10:38 PM To: Unicode Discussion Subject: Re: Ways to show Unicode contents on Windows? On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 05:15:51AM +0000, Murray Sargent wrote: > A bulk approach works. The hyperlink gives full instructions on how to set up > the fonts. You can customize it by changing the fonts listed in default.cfl. Thanks. —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— BTW, Andrew Cunningham noted in PM that my silent assumption that “font supporting given characters” implies simple-rendering is wrong: Graphite fonts have an embedded renderer. So it makes sense to explicitly augment my restrictions to: Suppose that the given Unicode characters are supported by an OpenType font available on the system; The text does not require complex rendering. Are are any Windows applications designed for use by “population at large” which support rendering such Unicode text? By default? By suitable tuneup within limits of a D-grade sophomore student? Are there any web browsers (except FF — see for-FF recipes in my OP) which can be tuned in this way? (I distrubute solutions to math HW as a Unicode text nowadays. ;-) Thanks, Ilya
