It is frustrating as a font developer to now be able to do some incredibly clever things relatively easily for complex scripts on Windows, and still be faced with mort, morx and state tables on the Mac side, especially when we're trying to support scholars and others with advanced needs. To date, Biblical Hebrew is the most difficult piece of OT development I've had to do -- getting the nikud and teamin positioning to interract properly is very fiddly, especially since I need to handle some non-standard elements like right-positioned meteg in the Biblia Hebraici Stuttgartensia text --, and I'm pretty sure that I would have to hire a telephone exchange programmer (or Dave Opstad) to achieve the same results in AAT. I think I've always been very fair in pointing out the processing advantages of GX/AAT -- and the advantage of this model for scripts not yet supported in external shaping engines like Uniscribe --, even as I curse the development obstacles and question the need for so complex a technology for 95% of the world's text and typography needs. But I end up feeling sorry for people who have invested in Macs when they're left on the sidelines as Microsoft and even Adobe stream past them on the complex script front, with more and better application and font support. I feel particularly for scholarly users, many of whom became Mac users as a result of Apple's effective marketing in the educational field, and who now have what I have to consider a second class platform for the kind of work that they need to do (and increasingly likely to become a third class platform as FreeType and ICU improve OT support).
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It is necessary that by all means and cunning, the cursed owners of books should be persuaded to make them available to us, either by argument or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
