On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 09:43:33PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: > On Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:49:34 +0200 > "Adam D. Ruppe" <destructiona...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Wednesday, 18 September 2013 at 20:33:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote: > > > Plus, they don't include quite enough Unicode glyphs for my > > > needs (actually, do they even support unicode at all?!). > > > > not really, I don't think so anyway. They (at least on my box) > > have some iso 8859-1 characters, but not beyond that. > > > > I've always felt text rendering engines should be able to > automatically fallback to another font for any characters that aren't > in the selected font. (Ideally with a user-configurable chain of > fallbacks, similar to CSS, but selected on a per-character basis.) > Because showing the right character in a mismatched font has *got* to > be better than not showing the character at all and a generic "missing > font" glyph.
Opera actually does this. But sometimes it can backfire, like the time when my default font didn't contain the glyph for the ยต symbol, and opera used a 5-pixel-wide substitute scaled up to 18 pixels with horrible, horrible antialiasing artifacts that made it nigh unreadable. But then again, Opera didn't exactly provide a way to specify the order of font resolution either, so that didn't help. I agree that *sane* fallback fonts (with configurable fallback order!) would be much better than just a black blob of ink (or pixels). [...] > > BTW I'm pretty sure Unicode has a few user defined sections that > > would be ideal for this. You set a bitmap for your user defined > > characters and then send them right out. > > Unicode even has (experimental, last I checked) pages defined for a > variety of common (and not-so-common) non-text symbols. The four > playing card suits, methods of transportation, etc. That's no longer experimental. Even within the BMP alone (U+0 .. U+FFFF), there are entire codepages dedicated to symbols, dingbats, etc.. Any modern Unicode font should have most of these symbols by default (though unlikely *all* -- there are *that* many of them!). Better yet, there's the Private Use region that you can map to basically anything you want, including a range in the BMP (U+E000 .. U+F8FF) consisting of a whopping 6400 code points. Just the thing you need for custom bitmaps and other fun stuff. :) T -- Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? -- Erich Schubert