You misunderstand me. Whilst I have no objection to paying for ADDED value, I'm talking about what comes built in, out of the box.
Everything in the box is added value. Only the box is free. :)
You see, I'm not talking about "good" fonts, just "basic" fonts. In fact, any fonts. Essentially, I expect every character to display, albeit poorly, but to display. I expect the operating system to provide a fallback font for every character. The Macintosh does exactly this. Windows doesn't. That's all.
Have you looked at the Apple Last Resort font? Knowing from what character block an unsupported character comes is handy, but I wouldn't equate a little box with a picture and a Unicode range name with actually displaying, however poorly, a specific character. Microsoft, on the other hand, provides at least one actual and fully working font for every *script* that they claim to support. This is a major investment (I don't know of any other company that spends anything like as much on font licensing and, especially, new font development), and I think they have every right to consider this added value.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
- Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_
