Re: Unicode Fonts and Vera

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 11:58:04PM +0000, Sander Vesik wrote:

> >As for font coverage, a font covering all scripts isn't necessarly a
> >good idea; however what should be the case imho is that a font covering
> 
> I can't agree with this - if you write using several scripts inside one 
> document you definitely want that font to cover all teh scripts used, or 
> chnaces are very good that the others look way out of place - inline 
> quotations (as opposed to a separate, outline paragraph) can make this 
> *MUCH* worse.

I haven't seen anything bad with pango+fontconfig; which apparently
do a good job of combining different fonts for plain text rendering
of multi-script text.
And for real typesetting, you definitively want different fonts for
each script (and you use a markup language allowing to tell it; all
wordprocessors handle that).

What is needed however, is that ranges inside a script be complete,
to avoid having only a few glyphs coming from another font for a
*same* script, which gives an ulgy output; but having different
scripts coming from different fonts is not necessarly bad

even more, I have never seen a font covering *all* scripts and
windings encodable in unicode; and I don't expect to ever see one.

What is irritating however is to have a font which is missing only
one letter (that is often the case for Azeri, in some cases the font
even has the lowercase schwa but misses the upper case one...)

> >They lack a lot of glyphs: polish, romanian, esperanto, vietnamese,
> >maltese, lithuanian, latvian, hungarian, welsh, azeri are some of
> >the not covered languages (or maybe some of the accented chars can be
> >composed on the fly with opentype method? still, with the existing
> >accents in the font, it will suffice only for romanian and welsh)
> >Most of the missing glyphs could easily be added, as glyphs with the
> >same diacritics are already present.
> >The only real new ones are: the schwa, vietnamese ohorn and uhorn.
> 
> Vera does not contain the combining variants of the accents. even if it 
> did, the support for using such is in general really crappy.

Vera has glyphs for the combining accents (well, for some of them);
if you open the file with pfaedit you'll see them.
I don't know if they are accessible though (they seem to be encoded as
"unknown glyph")

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
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