On Tue, 2003-08-19 at 15:45, Michael Everson wrote:
> At 15:04 -0400 2003-08-19, James H. Cloos Jr. wrote:
> > >>>>> "John" == John Jenkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> >John> (Apple's LastResort font [contains every Unicode character],
> >John> of course, but by virtually of rampant reuse of glyphs.)
> >
> >Does this Generate glyphs like the following ascii- & utf8-art?
>
> No. It generates much much better glyphs than that. See
> http://developer.apple.com/fonts/LastResortFont/
Of course, "better" here really depends on what you want.
Prettier? Yes. More useful for Joe User who gets Sinhala
spam? Yes. More useful if you are trying to debug why, in
a span of Arabic text, some characters aren't being located
in a font? Not really.
> >I find it interesting, if so, that Apple uses a font to acheive that
> >rather than a bit of code in the rendering libs.
>
> What Mac OS X does is when it encounters a Unicode character, it sees
> if it's in the current font. If it's not, it starts looking through
> all the other fonts until it finds one that is suitable. The Last
> Resort Font has glyphs for all the characters, so it's the last one
> looked at.
If you have a Last Resort style font, Pango should pick it up
as well (*). The hex boxes are only drawn when *no* font
on the system contains the character.
Regards,
Owen
(*) With some caveats about fontconfig configuration that I'm
not going to get into here.
