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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199602272034.NAA05680@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...)
To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber)
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 13:34:56 -0700 (MST)
Cc: jehamby@lightside.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960227084804.250A-100000@fieber-john.campusview.indiana.edu> from "John Fieber" at Feb 27, 96 09:14:17 am
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> > system, unified TrueType font system, OLE).  Now I agree that, for example, 
> 
> With respect to fonts, that is in the domain of X which already handles
> bitmap, Adobe, speedo, and I'm not aware of any technical prolems with
> adding truetype, but what does the application care anyway?

X is a fixed cell rendering technology; that is, unlike PostScript,
glyphs are downloaded to cell-based fonts (or rendered there, in the
TrueType case).

This is, strictly speaking, incompatible with a large number of
non-8-bit ligatured languages (though compatible with CJK glyphs)
because of the location of "private use areas" relative to the
ligatured languages character sets in the Unicode standard.

Unicode is largely "anti-X" in these cases because of an intrinsic
bias toward glyph rendering engines using other than fixed-cell
techniques (understandable, considering who is behing Unicode).

These languages include Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Tamil, Devengari,
and other Indic scripts, etc..

Look no farther than the contrib program "xtamil" for a demonstration
of the hoops required.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.