On Sun, 30 Sep 2001, Brian Stell wrote: > My experience as a developer working on Mozilla Linux fonts is > that it is very common to need font merging. Consider Latin1 > documents generated on Microsoft systems: these often have > "smart quotes" which are not covered in iso8859-1 fonts. > The Euro, bullet, and others also are also fairly common.
At least in XFree86 (and hopefully soon also with X.Org releases), you certainly should not use ISO 8859-1 fonts any more! The BDF core fonts as well as practically all Truetype fonts cover the full CP1252 repertoire. ISO 8859-1 is history. It was a foul and smelly compromise that is not even suitable to encode the languages that is claims to support, e.g. English (missing quotes and euro), French (missing oe and euro) or German (missing quotes and euro) text. Let's forget about it asap. ISO 8859-1 fonts only play a role today on legacy X servers where nothing else is available. If XLFD subsetting were implemented for BDF fonts, a way of using ISO10646-1 fonts efficiently would be to only open the 256 position large rows of UCS that are actually used in a web page. For most European text and full CP1252 coverage this would be only the five rows 0x0000-0x02ff and 0x2000-0x21ff. You do not have to search for other fonts for the big merger, unless you actually need the character, and then you just download via XLFD subsetting the row of interest to check whether the character is there. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
