I have a technical/practical problem relating to this thread.

I have the job of typesetting a book whose text incorporates lots of
diacritics and also passages in a variety of exotic scripts, and it has
been typed "in Unicode." My computers are pre-Unicode (OS 8.6 and OS 9
with Language Kits [or 9.2 if I can find the relevant CD-ROM]); my
fonts, obviously, are pre-Unicode (the ones used in WWS, basically).

Does a Word file being "in Unicode" mean anything at all to me? Unicode
doesn't include a glyph for, for instance, o with underdot and macron
and tilde and acute accent (not an impossible combination), does it? But
I have the ability of typesetting such a character using a combination
of precomposed and floating items. But how could "Unicode" tell
FrameMaker (a typesetting program with far more control than Word) what
to do?

Do I have to throw away my entire collection of exotic fonts when I move
up to OS X 10.2, because they were made before there was a Unicode
standard -- and because (in particular) the abugida characters (aksharas
of Indic scripts, and Ethiopic) are done with clever combinations of
near-arbitrary components?

Or what?

Don't I still want to be using PostScript fonts, because high-end
typesetting machines are driven by PostScript?

John Cowan wrote:

>
> Nicholas Bodley scripsit:
>
> > Macchiato has a delightful Web page...
> > <http://www.macchiato.com/unicode/show.html>
> > [...]
> > I'm curious to know where it gets its glyphs from! One thinks there's
> > something like a complete Unicode font hiding somewhere.
>
> Of course there is: the set of fonts used to render the Unicode
> book itself. The wonders of This Frame/View Frame Source on Mozilla
> (right-click on the image to get this) reveal that the glyphs are being
> pulled directly from the Unicode site as individual gifs -- a slow and
> painful process.
>
> The underlying font glyphs are contributed by various font creators,
> especially Michael Everson, for use in the Unicode book. There is,
> however, no license granted to use them outside that context.
>
> AFAIK the best-maintained full Unicode font is James Kass's Code2000 (the
> BMP) and Code2001 (the SMP), available at http://home.att.net/~jameskass/ .
> Code2000 is shareware, and worth many times the US$5 James is asking.
> The coverage of Han characters is limited, but otherwise it's pretty
> close to comprehensive.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...