On Feb 28, 2007, at 9:22 AM, Michael Diehr wrote:
>
> Do you know if the pan-Unicode font situation is improving in 10.5
> or Vista?
>
> In my situation, I need the installation to be a "clean" as
> possible, so installing fonts etc. is just not going to work.
> Perhaps the (ugly) alternative would be to save the text as bitmaps
> on the author's machine, and just display it as a picture on the
> reader's machine. The amount of text is rather small so the
> overall byte count is not really an issue.
I don't know what plans Apple or Microsoft might have for pan-Unicode
font support, but I would recommend that you not get your hopes up
too high...it's a difficult problem and one not easily solved. It's
further complicated by the fact that font technologies currently in
use have a hard limit of 65535 glyphs, and Unicode (5.0) encodes
quite a bit more than that -- so it's no longer possible to put "all
of Unicode" into a single font file. Nor would such a beast be
practical or even useful for more than a handful of people.
Probably wouldn't matter anyway...you would still need to ensure that
the font is available on the platform where you're running the
application (yes, users do uninstall fonts), and figure out some way
around it if it's not available.
If the text is small (in size and amount) and you are not concerned
with it being scalable (enlarged and still "smooth"), then yes,
perhaps pre-rendering it into a graphic is the way to go. But this
has problems, too (most notably, that text is not selectable for copy/
paste, etc.).
I think the most sensible plan is to spend some time doing a survey
of the character repertoire of fonts that are readily available
(installed by default or easily obtainable from system installers) on
the systems you intend to deploy on. It's not foolproof as I
mentioned above, but if you had a list of 2-3 fonts per platform that
are known to support the characters you want, you could probably make
that work most of the time. You could have something in your Help
file to the effect of, "you need to have such-and-such fonts
installed" or whatever.
Josh
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