On Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:47:03 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> Mac fonts have guillemets where Windows fonts have edh/thorn.

That is one detailed example of what Unicode and other aspects of i18n
take care of.

Even before Unicode, Latin-1 took care of that pretty well, and the rest
of the '8859 family helped further. Unicode came later.
In a field that is still developing quickly such as computers, life isn't
always easy unless one sticks to ASCII text alone.

> Mac fonts have the diacritics for most European languages (but not the
> Polish/Latvian overdot or the underdot that I don't think figures in any
> standard roman alphabet), Windows fonts have a few useless dingbats.

Arial Unicode and the WGL4 fonts are Windows fonts. James Kass' shareware
fonts ($5US, very likely) are also for Windows; his cover some scripts not
included in Arial Unicode. All of these have far more glyphs than older
"256-codepoint" fonts.

> Anyway Mac fonts have a few more slots (8?) than Windows fonts.

Good gosh. While they are still alive and having some problems, fonts
with only 256 codepoints (that's 8 bits), I'd say, are starting to become
outdated.

A few 64-bit computers are now quite affordable; it seems that the
software is still mostly catching up to the hardware.

===

Peter T. Daniels' comments about "real" angle brackets (my quotes)
prompted me to look them up in the Unicode 3.0 book, and I realized that I
have probably rarely, if ever seen them; it was a surprise. The included
angle in the glyphs of that book is maybe 150 or 160 degrees; very
"shallow" -- obtuse angles.

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath