Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>
>
> (When the Vai syllabary proved too big for one font, we simply scanned
> script specimens and dropped them into the WWS text.)
>
> ((And, computer engineers, don't start that bullshit about fonts
> accommodating thousands of characters -- in 1993 they couldn't.
> Period.))

There is nothing wrong with scanning as a solution to your problem.

But engineers (and perhaps you too) would have considered (and possibly
rejected) the idea of using *multiple* smaller fonts to accomplish the
task. It would have worked, but maybe that page or section wasn't worth
the effort. Only you could have decided that at the time when faced with
the task.

I don't know what system you were using, so I can't say for sure whether
fonts on your system supported thousands of characters then. But some
systems had fonts that did - there were certainly large Asian fonts
available on Windows by then.

Still, Ken Lunde also mentioned when speaking about his book that he
spent a tone of time making special fonts in order to make the tables in
his book, probably not unlike what you had to do. It wasn't that
technology didn't support large fonts, it was that no fonts had the set
of glyphs with related properties that he needed.

Best,

Barry