At 10:22 am -0600 1/10/02, John H. Jenkins wrote:
>On Tuesday, October 1, 2002, at 08:42 AM, Alan Wood wrote:
>
>>I don't think anyone replied to this. As far as I know, these are the only
>>applications for Mac OS 9 that can use Windows TrueType fonts:
>>
>
>On X, any (non-Classic) application can use Windows TrueType fonts.
>Carbon applications which do not explicitly use ATSUI or MLTE are
>limited in how much of the font they can use. Cocoa apps are pretty
>much able to do anything.
Even better -- TT fonts (provided they do not use Unicode code
points) can be used in ANY classic app from System 8.6 onwards (at
least) with or without OS 10.
To make a font recognisable in OS <10, it must have its file type and
creator types set. To do this, select a single font file in the
finder and run this script:
tell application "Finder"
set fontfile to selection as string as alias
set file type of fontfile to "sfnt"
set creator type of fontfile to "movr"
end tell
TT fonts (such as Arial Unicode MS) can only be used in OS 8/9 in
applications such as WorldText, which means, so far as I know,
WorldText period. Mac developers have not been and still are not
rushing to produce editors that understand Unicode. Some of them
seem to believe their apps understand Unicode and make out to their
customers that they do, but this is pure fantasy. The illusion was
successfully created by Apple while they dragged their feet for years
and did conjuring tricks with the TEC.
TT fonts, whether Unicode or not, will work fine without modification
in OS 10 and it suffices to put them in ~/Library/Fonts/. I forget
whether you need to log out to activate them.
I am hoping that the first serious Unicode word processor to emerge
will be Nisus, which has done such wonderful service with
multilingual stuff in the past. Microsoft's Office X cannot yet
display Unicode, though it looks as if it can 'store' Unicode behind
its lines of dashes without destroying it by converting it. I
haven't tried, but it's quite possible that a Word X doc containing
(undisplayed) Unicode strings can be transferred to Windows and
displayed properly. I'm just guessing here and am not going to
bother trying because I detest MS Word in all its weak flavours.
JD
