Re: Arabic cursive in Unicode

"Danny" <dragon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Yes, this is the problem. I don't quite understand why the makers of
Arial (is it Monotype?) and other big-name fonts didn't just go the
whole way and include the whole damn' Unicode set, rather than just the
ones they thought people were least likely to miss.

Because creating a font is a painstaking process. Download
Fontedit--it's Free Software--and just see how complicated even a
single character can be, sometimes taking hours to get just right.

There are projects that have covered enormous swaths of Unicode in
short time, such as Code 2000 and Titus Cyberbit, but the
typographical quality certainly can't match that of the ranges
carefully covered by respected foundries.

At the moment, there is the DejaVu fonts project, which is building on
the Bitstream Vera fonts the foundry released under a liberal license
a few years ago. There is much attention to typographic quality here,
but usually must wait a couple of versions before a newly introduced
character is fully tweaked.

Goodness only knows what I'll encounter when I start to tackle
Chinese...

Arial Unicode MS, which ships with Microsoft Office, does cover all
any student of Chinese will ever need.

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

.

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