Re: current version of unicode font (Open Type) in e-mails
Arial Unicode MS version 1.01 is most current and shipped with Office 2003. I called it OpenFont. Sorry! I double-clicked on its icon - whith a colored OT - in \WINDOWS\Fonts again it says after version 1.xx (Opent Type). I took that to mean Open Source or something more open than MS's restrictive policy about it. I still claim it does not deserve the label OPEN at present. All what is labeled Open does not mean OpenSource, much less free; these days, it is much more a marketing gimmick. For example, here in Europe (where it is not common), some stores are marked open all night long. But nobody expects them to offer free food ;-). Open Type is a technology, that requires the application to provide some processing itself (instead on relying on the graphical engine as with Type 1 or TrueType): so the font is open to the application. And to avoid confusion: OpenType (well, TrueType Open as it was named then) predates OpenSource. Also, I am not sure of the licensing conditions of Arial Unicode MS, particularly v.1.01 (I did not license Office 2003, so I cannot easily check.) I was understanding that back with Office 2000 and 2002, once you licensed Office on one computer or for one user, you owned the right to use it even with another operating system, say Linux. (On the other hand, I know things are different for fonts like Latha, that come with the operating system itself, and it seems prohibited to use them on another system.) Can they just be copied into \WINDOWS\Fonts as is the easiest 'installation' of ttf-fonts ? Not really. The system will not notice it, at least until you reboot it. A trick that works well for me is to copy it there, then to launch Explorer on this very directory. This way Windows forces a re-enumeration of the folder, and it will register your newly added font. Also, alternatively, you can open the folder in Explorer and drop the font inside it. Vice versa MS-fonts can be installed under Linux, See above: you really chould check the licensing conditions. And beware, since they varies from font to font, or even from release to release (for example, with Arial, you can of course install the one that come with freecorefonts, but i understand you are not allowed to install the newer release that come with XP.) Antoine
RE: current version of unicode-font
On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 07:51:42 -0800, Peter Constable wrote: Microsoft has never used the label 'OpenFont' for this or any of the fonts that ship with their products. However, the .ttf fonts that ship with their products are showing an OT icon. I don't know how it's done technically. Cristi
RE: current version of unicode-font
On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:10:37 +0200, Cristian Secarã wrote: On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 07:51:42 -0800, Peter Constable wrote: Microsoft has never used the label 'OpenFont' for this or any of the fonts that ship with their products. However, the .ttf fonts that ship with their products are showing an OT icon. I don't know how it's done technically. Because Arial Unicode MS includes OpenType tables, and is thus technically an OpenType font. OpenType is a font technology, and does not imply that any such font is free and open source -- since when did open ever mean free anyway ? The original term mentioned in this thread, OpenFont does not exist (other than as a programming method in certain APIs), and so, as Peter rightly pointed out, OpenFont does not apply to Arial Unicode MS or any Microsoft font or any font that I know of. Andrew
Re: current version of unicode-font
On Friday, December 03, 2004 13:10, Cristian Secar va escriure: However, the .ttf fonts that ship with their products are showing an OT icon. I don't know how it's done technically. Technically, it is done by including a (valid) 'DSIG' (digital signature) subtable into the font file, that is a table whose only aim is to guarantee that the fontfile has been unaltered (using cryptographic seals as used for certificated e-mails). The interesting thing is that while the specification for this 'DSIG' table is part of OpenType, it is completely unrelated to what people usually associates with this technology, that is the possibility to have complex script and advanced typography support (see my previous post for details, since I did the mistake myself ;-).) Neither it is related to the fact (also introduced by the OpenType specifications) to have the outlines and hints stored in Postscript format (rather than the traditional TrueType format) As a result, having the nice-looking OT on a font is misleading, it just means the designer have paid Verisign for a class 3 certificate and signed its font. And last but not least it ensures you the font has not been modified (I am hoping Windows is actually checking the seal, but when I thought a bit more I am not 100% sure, since this is a process that is somewhat time-consuming, and it does not appear to me that Windows is less quick to draw the content of this folder...) Antoine
RE: current version of unicode font (Open Type) in e-mails
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter R. Mueller-Roemer Sorry! I double-clicked on its icon - whith a colored OT - in \WINDOWS\Fonts again it says after version 1.xx (Opent Type). I took that to mean Open Source or something more open than MS's restrictive policy about it. I still claim it does not deserve the label OPEN at present. I'm not sure how you got OpenFont from OT. Fortunately for much of the type industry, there is no prior IP claim on the English word open. In this case, as has been mentioned, OT stands for OpenType, a font format that is used for advanced typographic capabilities, so named because the specification for the format is published openly and is available for anyone to use in development of their own products. That certainly seems to me to be a reasonable application of the word open. Vice versa MS-fonts can be installed under Linux If you wish to use fonts that ship with MS products on another platform, please ensure that you read the EULA of the product with which they were shipped first. SIL-fonts and TITUS have been called legacy or not up to date in our forum What about the SIL and TITUS fonts is legacy? and I found them disappointing for my purposes: Predictable display and print of sequences of base + combining diacritical sequence in ordinary e-mails on all systems. Are you sure that there isn't any fault with some of the platforms or applications running on them rather than the fonts? E.g. there may be some bugs in the Doulos SIL font, but on the whole I'd say that if you don't get predictable display results on some system I'd be questioning the system before I question the font. Peter Constable
Re: current version of unicode font (Open Type) in e-mails
On 03/12/2004 09:40, Peter R. Mueller-Roemer wrote: ... With bwhebb.ttf I had success! But I don't think this is open in the sense you mean. It is, I think, a part of the commercial package BibleWorks, and not in the public domain. It is also a legacy font which uses Unicode Latin-1 code points for combining marks in contradiction to their Unicode properties - not to mention ignoring their Unicode reference glyphs and semantics. SIL-fonts and TITUS have been called legacy or not up to date in our forum ... *Some* SIL fonts are legacy fonts like bwhebb.ttf i.e. not Unicode compatible, and so not recommended for use except among a group of people who already have them installed. *Other* SIL fonts are Unicode compatible, and so up to date useful for general e-mail, if properly flagged with a character set. I don't know about all TITUS fonts, but the one I recommended here not long ago is an up to date Unicode font. ... and I found them disappointing for my purposes: Predictable display and print of sequences of base + combining diacritical sequence in ordinary e-mails on all systems. I am confused. Are you using irony here? Or do you mean that the combining marks were displayed separately following the base characters? I would expect that with legacy fonts on some systems, but not predictably on all systems. The Unicode fonts certainly should give you predictable and correct results, at least on all systems using Unicode-capable mail clients. (But don't assume that even people at the Unicode Consortium use such clients.) Legacy fonts will work in e-mail only if you specify the font in HTML, if the recipient has the correct font installed, and the recipient's system chooses not to enforce certain Unicode properties e.g. that all Latin-1 characters are base characters and not combining marks. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
Re: current version of unicode font (Open Type) in e-mails
Peter Constable petercon at microsoft dot com quoted Peter R. Mueller-Roemer: SIL-fonts and TITUS have been called legacy or not up to date in our forum What about the SIL and TITUS fonts is legacy? There was a confused discussion last week over SIL Ezra and Ezra SIL, and the fact that the older one used PUA code points (falsely rumored to be high ASCII) to support something that the newer one supported using proper Unicode techniques. So the older one might be considered legacy in a way. Distribution of TITUS Cyberbit Basic was severely limited at one point, and many users may still have versions that are only updated to Unicode 2.1. That would not count as legacy, but it would certainly be not up to date. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
Re: current version of unicode-font
On Thursday 2004.12.02 15:51:14 -0800, Richard Cook wrote: On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, John Cowan xiele: Paul Hastings scripsit: speaking of which, *are* there any open source fonts that come even close to Arial Unicode MS? In the section on Pan Unicode Fonts on http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/ , I note: One disadvantage of pan-Unicode fonts are that glyphs from different scripts are often not aesthetically integrated across script blocks. Secondly, since it is nearly impossible for one or a few font designers to have been thoroughly schooled in the typographic traditions of numerous cultures and nations, glyphs in some of the script blocks may be of lower technical or aesthetic quality than glyphs in other script blocks. Finally, differences in national typographic traditions can lead to situations where glyphs which are adequate in one country appear odd or inappropriate in another country. For example, glyphs that are ideal for writing Arabic in Egypt are very likely not ideal for writing Urdu in Pakistan, even though both languages share the same basic alphabet ... (Visit the web site if you are interested in the rest of the commentary). Althought Arial Unicode MS is a very good Pan-Unicode font, it does most definitely suffer in that glyphs in certain script blocks are not aesthetically pleasing and may have less-than-ideal OpenType features for the placement of diacritics. For example, the glyphs in the Thai block in Arial Unicode MS are not nearly as aesthetically pleasting as the glyphs in fonts in the Thai National Font Project from NECTEC, so if you really want to read Thai, you are better off getting the Thai national font set. *That* thought leads us to another way to address the problem that Paul Hastings seems to be alluding to --the problem of having glyphs for every script one is going to come across-- which is to install multiple fonts where each individual font is optimized for one or more script blocks that one is interested in. In this case, the answer to Mr. Hastings question can be answered: YES, there ARE Open Source (or otherwise liberally-licensed) fonts which are both aesthetically pleasing and are optimized for the correct placement of diacritics for a large number of different script blocks in Unicode. Of course the problem is, where are they? And the answer is, they are all over the place! To address this issue, I decided to winnow a lot of chaff from the grain and created the afore-mentioned resource: http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/ ... which I previously announced on one of the Linux internationalization mailing lists, but I think I neglected to announce it here (oops!). Take a look to see what is available. I put this resource together with the explicit aim of finding all of the open source and otherwise liberally-licensed fonts that I could for as many script blocks as I could. Of course it is not finished, but it is a start. (I have even thought of creating a little shell script which would let one download a wide selection of the fonts that are mentioned on the site. Of course, the problem is that people often change the version numbers and URLs of download sites, so a script has only a limited life time of utility ...). A final comment or two on the aesthetics of GNU Unifont and James Kass' CODE 2000: (1) GNU Unifont is not supposed to be pretty, it is a 100% utilitarian bitmap font. Period. There are areas where the bitmaps could be better, and I believe, if memory serves correctly, that James Su of Novell/SuSE did some work to improve some of the CJK section for SuSE's Linux distribution(s). Other sections of the font have some gaps, and the bitmap formats around which GNU Unifont was originally built do not support any of the OpenType, AAT or Graphite features needed for CTL layout of Indic and other scripts. (2) I have always believed that James Kass' objective with CODE 2000 was to *first* cover as much of the BMP as possible, and worry about aesthetic details later. For providing admirable coverage of Unicode for five dollars -- that sounds like a good deal to me, and I think CODE 2000 has served its purpose quite well. The global reach of the internet combined with the availability of Unicode-enabled operating systems from all the major vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Linux, Sun) is now spurring the development of numerous new fonts for native language computing in various scripts, -- and many of these are being released under open source licenses like the GPL or similarly liberal licenses such as what SIL has for Gentium and other fonts. The easy availability of these new fonts greatly reduces the need for Pan-Unicode fonts like CODE 2000 or MS Arial Unicode . -- 2004.12.03 Ed Trager In what, breadth of coverage or aesthetics? The GNU Unifont has
RE: current version of unicode-font
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Peter R. Mueller-Roemer I found some serious faults (with the implementation of short sequences of combining diacritical marks, Greek and Hebrew with their accents and points) with Arial Unicode MS version 1.00 (C) ...- 2000. I would like to test the newest version of this and other fonts, but am reading that MS is not allowing / providing download of this font any more. 1. Which is the currently most up-to-date version, and where can I find it. The most recently shipped version is 1.01, which ships with Office 2003. 2. If the newest version can only be had by buying new Office-products, than the label 'OpenFont' is not deserved. Microsoft has never used the label 'OpenFont' for this or any of the fonts that ship with their products. Peter Constable
Re: current version of unicode-font
Peter Constable wrote: Microsoft has never used the label 'OpenFont' for this or any of the fonts that ship with their products. speaking of which, *are* there any open source fonts that come even close to Arial Unicode MS?
Re: current version of unicode-font
Paul Hastings scripsit: speaking of which, *are* there any open source fonts that come even close to Arial Unicode MS? In what, breadth of coverage or aesthetics? The GNU Unifont has very wide coverage though it is a bitmap font; James Kass's CODE 2000 and CODE 2001 probably have the widest coverage of any font, though it costs US$5 to use them. Both of them IMHO are a tad on the ugly side. Googling for free Unicode fonts (no quotes) is useful. -- One Word to write them all, John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] One Access to find them, http://www.reutershealth.com One Excel to count them all,http://www.ccil.org/~cowan And thus to Windows bind them.--Mike Champion
Re: current version of unicode-font
John Cowan wrote: In what, breadth of coverage or aesthetics? The GNU Unifont has very breadth mainly. i'm more interested in fonts for testing i18n web app output than looking nice. Googling for free Unicode fonts (no quotes) is useful. sort of, when i've googled for this in the past, language-specific (chinese seemed to be the most frequent) fonts turn up more often than not. hey if you guys don't know, who does?
Re: current version of unicode-font
On Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:38:25 +0700, Paul Hastings wrote: John Cowan wrote: Googling for free Unicode fonts (no quotes) is useful. sort of, when i've googled for this in the past, language-specific (chinese seemed to be the most frequent) fonts turn up more often than not. hey if you guys don't know, who does? As someone once said, Google is your friend, but if you don't have time to google yourself these (and many other similar pages) may give you some useful pointers : http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Fonts.html Andrew
RE: current version of unicode-font
Subject: RE: current version of unicode-font On Thu, 2 Dec 2004 at 07:51:42 -0800, Peter Constable wrote: The most recently shipped version is 1.01, which ships with Office 2003. ... and Office 2004 doesn't ship with Arial Unicode MS at all! Kevin
Re: current version of unicode-font
On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, John Cowan xiele: Paul Hastings scripsit: speaking of which, *are* there any open source fonts that come even close to Arial Unicode MS? In what, breadth of coverage or aesthetics? The GNU Unifont has very wide coverage though it is a bitmap font; James Kass's CODE 2000 and CODE 2001 probably have the widest coverage of any font, though it costs US$5 to use them. Both of them IMHO are a tad on the ugly side. In all fairness, the CODE 2000 font from James Kass is quite beautiful, conceptually speaking. If the current execution is a tad ungainly here and there, I ask 3 questions: (0) What do you want for nothing (if you have not yet paid the shareware fee)?; (1) What do you want for $5?; and (2) what do you want from a $5 shareware font that aspires to perfect coverage of the *entire* BMP? Code2000 is not open source, but Kass is remarkably responsive to user input. I urge everyone to download a copy of Code2000, and provide the developer with feedback, both in terms of suggestions to improve the TrueType font, and in terms of money to fund development. http://home.att.net/~jameskass/ James is doing some great work, using some relatively low-level programming tools. In my experience (admittedly somewhat limited, since I don't care about *everything* in the BMP) his font works where other fonts, professional and amature, completely fail. If a font has the glyph you need in any form, that's far better than having a glyph of last resort, or no glyph at all. Disclaimer: I have no commercial relation to Kass, and have received no compensation for this endorsement. This review should also not be taken as expressing approval of the shape of any glyph in the Code2000 font, especially the Capital Letter J, which I think even Kass himself has called quirky at best. Note however that the Code2000 hexagram block characters do look quite nice, and better yet, they work in Adobe Illustrator CS, though no one (neither Kass nor Adobe) seems to know why yet :-)
Re: current version of unicode-font
John Cowan wrote, In what, breadth of coverage or aesthetics? The GNU Unifont has very wide coverage though it is a bitmap font; James Kass's CODE 2000 and CODE 2001 probably have the widest coverage of any font, though it costs US$5 to use them. Code2001 is freeware. Both of them IMHO are a tad on the ugly side. There's always room for improvement. Best regards, James Kass
