On Feb 28, 2007, at 9:22 AM, Michael Diehr wrote: > > Do you know if the pan-Unicode font situation is improving in 10.5 > or Vista? > > In my situation, I need the installation to be a "clean" as > possible, so installing fonts etc. is just not going to work. > Perhaps the (ugly) alternative would be to save the text as bitmaps > on the author's machine, and just display it as a picture on the > reader's machine. The amount of text is rather small so the > overall byte count is not really an issue.
I don't know what plans Apple or Microsoft might have for pan-Unicode font support, but I would recommend that you not get your hopes up too high...it's a difficult problem and one not easily solved. It's further complicated by the fact that font technologies currently in use have a hard limit of 65535 glyphs, and Unicode (5.0) encodes quite a bit more than that -- so it's no longer possible to put "all of Unicode" into a single font file. Nor would such a beast be practical or even useful for more than a handful of people. Probably wouldn't matter anyway...you would still need to ensure that the font is available on the platform where you're running the application (yes, users do uninstall fonts), and figure out some way around it if it's not available. If the text is small (in size and amount) and you are not concerned with it being scalable (enlarged and still "smooth"), then yes, perhaps pre-rendering it into a graphic is the way to go. But this has problems, too (most notably, that text is not selectable for copy/ paste, etc.). I think the most sensible plan is to spend some time doing a survey of the character repertoire of fonts that are readily available (installed by default or easily obtainable from system installers) on the systems you intend to deploy on. It's not foolproof as I mentioned above, but if you had a list of 2-3 fonts per platform that are known to support the characters you want, you could probably make that work most of the time. You could have something in your Help file to the effect of, "you need to have such-and-such fonts installed" or whatever. Josh _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
