[XeTeX] combining characters in isolation

David Perry hospes.primus at verizon.net
Sun Jul 11 20:21:24 CEST 2010



Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:
> David Perry wrote:
> 
>> If a font is truly Unicode-compliant, then it should contain the
>> characters I used to test (or the ones you need).
> 
> I'm not convinced this statement is true : it is my belief
> that a font can be "truly Unicode-compliant", yet still
> contain only a small fraction of the full set of glyphs
> in the Unicode standard.
Of course this is true; I did not mean to suggest that a 
Unicode-compliant font would have all Unicode characters!  (I, as a 
sometime font developer, have no interest in creating ~65,000 characters 
per font--actually, over a million now with the supplementary characters!)

What I meant, given the context of the messages, was: if a font is 
intended to support Bengali--as I believe fonts that Mike was attempting 
to use were--then it should have all the Bengali Unicode characters and 
one should not get those blank boxes if one tries to display a character 
from that range in a document.  If it doesn't have all the Unicode 
characters needed for a particular range, it's either a pre-Unicode font 
or a badly constructed one.  Change "Bengali" to whatever language you 
need to work in at the moment.

David



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