> Why would one NEED to upgrade the OS to use Old Italic? You can't expect an OS like Windows XP to support Old Italic characters that weren't even defined in Unicode at the time it shipped. (Likewise for any OS version in relation to characters yet to be encoded.) There was no way to know at that time what character might be assigned to some as-yet-unassigned code point, and hence what behaviours it would have.
That said, it turns out that a given version of Windows does support later-encoded characters such as Old Italic that have no special requirements fairly well -- provided you have a font and format your content with that font. Peter -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ilya Zakharevich Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 5:21 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Ways to show Unicode contents on Windows? On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 04:46:23AM +0000, Peter Constable wrote: > Your Tai Tham situation is, of course, exceptional. For a lot of users, though, if they would only update their XP machines to even Windows 7, if not Windows 8.1, they'd find a lot of characters they've been missing are well supported. Someone I know just discovered that Windows 8 supports Old Italic, and has decided to upgrade. I think that that example of yours supports my point of view 100%. Why would one NEED to upgrade the OS to use Old Italic? (And I should not mention how painful [I'm self-censoring] the upgrade to Win8 is for everybody…) It is the case of simple rendering. Given a font, and a keyboard layout (both doable in user-land), it should “just work”. Or I am missing something? Or maybe you mean that if one has applications installed with Old Italic characters in the name, then Tap-WinKey-Then-Type-the-Name-of-Application will be able to find it even if one types “normal” Latin characters? ======================================================= This brings in another question: are folding-for-search rules user-configurable on “your” OS(es)? Thanks, Ilya
