--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> >
> > --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter Constable" <petercon@...> wrote:
> > > > From: Peter T. Daniels [mailto:grammatim@...]

> > > > Standard Mac fonts don't _have_ edh or thorn.

> > > I find that difficult to believe, though not having a Mac in

front of me

> > > at the moment I can't prove otherwise.

> > > > Icelandic isn't one of the
> > > > many languages they're designed to accommodate. Hungarian is,

but I

> > > > gather standard Windows fonts don't have the long-umlaut

diacritic.

> > > Well, I know what an umlaut diacritic is, but don't know how that
> > > differs from a "long-umlaut diacritic". If you could point me to a
> > > sample of one, I'd be interested to find out.

> > Well, having had a look at the Microsoft Sans Serif font, he clearly
> > doesn't mean double acute accent (U+030B),...
> At a guess, I'd say you're talking about Unicode, rather than about the
> standard Windows font with fewer than 255 characters?

I'm using Unicode to specify the character. That purpose by itself
makes the code charts (at www.unicode.org/charts ) very useful.
(Unfortunately, they are of less help with ligature-ridden
Brahmi-family scripts, but one can use the Unicode codepoint sequences
when talking to those who know the script.)

> Does this, BTW, mean that Unicode isn't useful for typing Hungarian
> without creating new characters from separate components? Are ordinary
> computer-users in Budapest supposed to be able to do that?

No. No. I was trying and failing to interpret your remark in a way
that made it true. To take a practical example, a font's having a
cicumflex on just the five vowels does not make it entirely true to
say that it has the circumflex diacritic - it wouldn't be able to
handle the circumflex on 'w' and 'y' in Welsh, let alone the 14 or
more other consonants the Thai transliteration standard ISO 11940:1998
needs it and three (or four?) other accents on.

By 'standard Windows' I now presume you mean the Windows-1252
encoding, an approximation to Latin-1. (The difference lies in the
use of codes 128 to 159, which can rebound on people who think they're
using ISO 8859-x, only to find they're using the Windows-y
approximation thereto.) The answer then is that if forced to use an
8-bit encoding, they would probably use Windows-1250 ~ Latin-2. Don't
rely on me to be correct in all the details; I only know that the
principle is correct. Similarly, to do reasonable Thai
Word-compatible word-processing I was selecting another 8-bit encoding
(Windows-874 ~ 'Latin-11' = TIS-620) until my wife bought me Microsoft
Office.

Richard.