Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> i18n@... wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> System 7.1.
>
> WorldScript II made two-byte fonts available. They came with TrueType
> and so could not be used with PostScript printers. (PostScript fonts
> were available, for ca. $3000 apiece.) I was not able to generate
> PostScript fonts for those chapters, and if you had read page xxxvii you
> would know that those chapters were outputted by an outside agency and
> handled as camera-ready copy.

Yeah those were the days :) It was definitely a transition time between
the way I remember my father's company creating magazines when I was a
child and the almost "never touched by human hands" model of today.

>
> > 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.
>
> Perhaps those fonts had subsequent commercial value.

I was at several public presentations Lunde gave where people asked if
he could make the fonts he described available to the community. He said
they were fragments, produced only for the production of the book and
wouldn't really be of much use beyond that. He didn't set out to make
anything for general use, only to get the book typeset.

Of course I suspect that Adobe did (and still does) fund his research is
related to the fact that the company gathered some experience that they
could use indirectly for commercial gain.

Which makes for an interesting contrast with your case where the work
was (apparently) funded by the publisher with an eye on the direct
bottom line. I wonder if Adobe might be interested in assisting you
somehow to make an updated version of WWS? It might be a feather in
their cap to be able to re-typeset it, and learn about the issues
involved for rarer languages. And you would probably be funded for a
good long time to complete the task if it came to pass. It would surely
be a very cool project!

Even if your original publisher is not interested, I can imagine that a
publisher like O'Reilly, which published Lunde, might be. Even if the
text wasn't changed to deal with computer issues at all, which are
O'Reilly's forte', it might still find a broader audience among
O'Reilly's fiercely devoted readers, which would be another benefit to you.

.

Best,

Barry