On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 03:19:44AM +0000, Peter Constable wrote: > > Why would one NEED to upgrade the OS to use Old Italic?
> You can't expect an OS like Windows XP to support Old Italic characters that weren't even defined in Unicode at the time it shipped. Yes I can. And did not you notice that on all other architectures my expectations are fullfilled? > (Likewise for any OS version in relation to characters yet to be encoded.) There was no way to know at that time what character might be assigned to some as-yet-unassigned code point, and hence what behaviours it would have. Did it ever stop Unicode crowd from insisting that people should better first prove usability of their new-characters proposals via PUA? If one can expect stuff in the PUA work, why should not one expect the stuff will still work when it is moved out of PUA? Moreover, I expect more: for the simple-rendering Unicode ranges which DO require knowledge about character’s behaviour, I expect that this knowledge may be ADDED LATER without an OS upgrade. (Preferably even without root access!) (At least what *I* develop supports this…) This concerns at least the LTR/RTL flags, the line breaking flags, and the combining status. (Is there anything else needed for simple-rendering of text files?) > That said, it turns out that a given version of Windows does support later-encoded characters such as Old Italic that have no special requirements fairly well -- provided you have a font and format your content with that font. I'm puzzled: how this bears with your advocating upgrade to w8 for the guy who liked to have Old Italic? [Of course, the situation for this guy may be very different if he had a support contract with Microsoft [or whatever it is called]. If not, then I suspect the only difference w8 could bring would be that the problems he encounters “without” vs “with” w8 would get a “very-slim” vs “slim” chance to be looked at…] Ilya
