Re: Foreign Glyphs (was Re: Proposed HTML 2.0 Entities - Rendering Errors)

Murray Altheim (murray.altheim@nttc.edu)
Thu, 29 Jun 1995 12:47:51 -0400

>Walter Ian Kaye wrote:
>>At 05:05p 06/27/95, Murray Altheim wrote:
>>[...]
>>But the real point I was trying to make was how to address this issue more
>>globally. Solving it on the Macintosh would be a step pointing the way for
>>others, and maybe this _is_ entirely a browser issue, and beyond the scope
>>of HTML. But most of our workstations (PC, Mac, UNIX, or others) do have
>>limitations in their character sets.
>[...]
>Times(R) is the typical default font, so the supplementary font should be
>drawn with similar metrics. I believe Fontographer 4.1 can generate fonts
>for Unix and NeXT as well as Mac and Windows. Since there aren't that many
>missing glyphs, a single 256-character font might be able to include every
>missing glyph from Mac, Unix, and Windows, although I'm only guessing as I
>don't know a Unix character set from Adam. ;) If the total is indeed less
>than 256, then we could even have a sort of "pseudo-standard" for the
>character codes, but that really isn't an issue since it's a "private" font
>and those codes are not specified by HTML.
>
>Howzzat?
>
>-Walter :)

Well, it sounds like this _is_ entirely a browser solution. Since the codes
for the entity characters already exist, all handling of them would be
properly done within the browser, since it's not up to HTML or the document
author to worry about the platform of its readers.

Hopefully browser developers (NCSA, Netscape and others) have some plans on
implementing a solution similar to the one you mention for each of their
platform-specific products, so that regardless of the font chosen by the
user for display, instances of those characters known to be absent from the
platform character set could be inserted as a glyphs from a special font
within the browser application. It would be displayed from the
browser-borne custom font in the current display size and style. It doesn't
even sound too difficult, coming from a TrueType platform where only one
custom font would be needed.

NCSA/Netscape? Anybody got plans?

Murray

[discussion from the www-html@mail.w3.org list]

__________________________________________________________________
Murray M. Altheim, Information Systems Analyst
National Technology Transfer Center, Wheeling, West Virginia
email: murray.altheim@nttc.edu
www: http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/people/maltheim/maltheim.html