Re: 64-bit extensions

[Dirk Muysers <muysers@innovation.capgemini.fr>]

Hello,

> MG > Of course all these fancy encodings are useless without some fonts
> MG > which actually use these encodings.  I am ignorant of font technologies.
> MG > Do standard Postscript fonts or ATM fonts support these encodings?
> 
> There are Unicode fonts, which can handle international characters.
> There are also language specific fonts, for instance, Gulim is a
> Korean font.  

The main problem with Unicode is not with the fonts (there are actually many
of them), but with font rendering. In quite a number of scripts, there is not
a one-to-one correspondence between the internal code, viz. UNICODE, used for
sorting, and the glyphs used for visualisation. In the indic languages, for
example (devanagari, bengali, gujarati, tamil, etc.), there are one-to-one,
one-to-many, as well as many-to-one relations. In addition, you must backtrack
while rendering! E.g., the code 'r', when it precedes a consonnant is reported
as a superscript of the last glyph of the actual syllable, and there is much
more of that sort. These things can in no way be handled by the font, which
is a passive component, but must be dealt with by the OS (GDI Dll, in case of
MS Windows), which is a far cry actually, although MS has made promesses in
that direction (cf. MSDN "Internationalization").

Dirk Muysers.