perl-unicode

Re: Reference Unicode Fonts

2002-02-15 03:27:31
Dan Kogai <dankogai(_at_)dan(_dot_)co(_dot_)jp> writes:
On 2002.02.15, at 06:36, Markus Kuhn wrote:
Markus
(XFree86 -misc-fixed-* font maintainer)

  Oh yes here comes Mr. Font!

You will find that many of the -misc-fixed-*-iso10646-1 fonts have
better coverage than Unifont. In particular, the fonts 6x13, 8x13, 9x15,
9x18, 10x20 cover the MES-3 repertoire of Unicode 3.0 completely, which
covers all IPA glyphs.

You may well have drawn them in those cell sizes - but X font names
would be easier to experiment with.

Unifont doesn't and it's combining characters
won't work with xterm either, which is particularly important for IPA.

When working with western scripts it is common to use bold and italic
to make things stand out. Now I can imagine that italic/oblique of
asian characters may not make sense - but how do users of such scripts
make the "standout" distinction - colour?

Be that as it may - to present western text in the normal manner it would
be useful to be able to rely on there being a bold (screen) and to a lesser
extent an italic (print) version of a particular font.

I would like to make this "easy" (e.g. in perl/Tk's Text widget),
so user says I want 14-point font - I want there to be a (set of) font(s)
for normal/bold/italic - now in certain spots in the codepoint space those
will be pointing at same X font - as there is no alternative.
What is a pain is if user then changes to 16-point font which sub-ranges
exist tend to change. So a lot of tedious probing of fonts occurs
and things get horribly slow.

This is what TrueType fonts score - if you can find one that looks reasonable
at typical size and has the right repertoire you "know" that all sizes will
_exist_ - they may look naff if user chooses 11pt or some odd size - but
if they do they will not do that.

Right now I think Unicode fonts are about where ASCII fonts were in early '80s
- okay for "tty mode" but seriously lacking for anything that approaches
modern "Word Processing".


The problem is definitely font.
  I wonder if there are free, scalable 'reference font' that contains
all major languages.  So far, -misc-fixed-*-iso10646-1 seems the only
one that comes close to that but it is not scalable.  MS Arial comes
close too but you need Win(2k|XP).  Hiragino on MacOS X is beautiful but
missing too many non-Japanese fonts to be a reference (besides it is not
free).
  I want for example

* Reference Serif Font  (Times Unicode?)

I prefer that style for printed matter (high resolution), but dislike
them for typical screen resolutions.

* Reference Serif Font  (Helvetica Unicode?)

I like those on screen - except for the fact that I (Capital I)
and l (lowercase L) tend to look identical. Helvetica/Arial/Lucida
all suffer the same.

* Reference Fixed Width (Misc TT?  Courier Unicode? Monaco Unicode?)

Fixed width -c- (and/or monospaced -m- ) makes life easy for editors.
But don't look very natural.


  that are free and open.  I know both Apple and MS have enough to make
such fonts.  I wonder why they don't contribute in this simple way (One
of the reasons that makes me doubt how serious they are about
Unicode/ISO10646)....

Adobe could do it as well. What Unicode fonts need is the equivalent of
their Helvetica/Time/Courier Medium/Bold Roman/Italic 12-font set
of PostScript-1 printers.

SIL (www.sil.org) also have a reasonable starting point.


Dan the Man with Too Many *.(ttf|ttc|otf|bdf) to browse
--
Nick Ing-Simmons
http://www.ni-s.u-net.com/


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