Truetype fonts for the Unicode characters from 0000 to FFFF (as for example issued by Microsoft) take up many megabytes.
How can you get glyphs for about 65000 characters without multi-megabyte downloads? The reason I used glyphs in a special format is because at the speed my amiga runs (an accelerated amiga 1200) just loading truetype fonts for 0000 to FFFF would take several minutes. And they would use up huge amounts of memory (say, 20 megs), and if you load a truetype font for a PC running at 1GHz, it still noticably slows the system down. To make a set of so many fonts usable quickly on an accelerated amiga 1200, you must use fonts on disk or in memory in such a way that their glyphs are not intermingled, their locations can be quickly calculated, and they don't need decoding. Also if they are in memory they cannot be in chip memory because glyphs in non- compressed form for all those characters take up about 2 megabytes. My system though can grab any Amiga bitmapped font into its own format in memory, so in effect it can use any Amiga font it likes for whatever characters occur in them (usually 8859-1 characters, of course). When you say "Unicode", prehaps you mean just small sets of characters like the 8859-1, 8859-2 etc? When you say "Unicode", do you include the adding of diacritical marks of many different sorts to characters? Truetype fonts can (in pricipal) do such things, but such capables make truetype fonts large slow and complex. Do you include the case of characters like Arabic which change in different contexts, or ligating characters, etc.? It seems incredible to me that someone could "implement Unicode" without megabytes of downloads. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matt Sealey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > ---snip--- > > > > > I have ideas about Unicode. All of them require little change to the > > > system as most people have them. Certainly it does not require a huge > > > multimegabyte download and many custom fonts.
