Can Maintype show fonts that include characters that do not have standard Unicode code.
For example the GaramondNo8BPS font is an old (pre-unicode) font where characters with Pāli diacritcals like ṇ, have a code (0xF3 in this case)) that is different from the standard Unicode (0x1E47) for that character.
It would be helpful to be able to find the fonts on my system where the codes for these diacritical character are different from Standard Unicode fonts.
Can I do a search, where, for example, the code for ṇ is different from the standard Unicode for that character which is 0x1E47? That should identify the fonts I am looking for.
Thank you very much for that very helpful suggestion,
I only just discovered MainType, yesterday, so there is much to learn.
I don’t yet fully understand why the Pāli chars are being shown shown correctly in most fonts, but are also shown in red which seems to mean that those characters are missing from the font? Other fonts are shown in white and those are the ones I expected to have no problems.
Another puzzle is that while the GaramondNo8BPS font does not show the sample text (ā Ā ṁ Ṁ ṇ Ṇ ṅ Ṅ ṭ Ṭ) correctly (as expected) the Garamond Pali font does show the sample text in the preview correctly. But Garamond Pali is a pre-unicode font. ṇ in that font is 0xBA which should show in the Preview as º . So using Pali in the preview sample text does not work in this case. It does not identify Garamond Pali as a non-unicode font.
As I said, there’s lots to learn about how MainType works with these unusual fonts.
Thirty years ago, most fonts did not include the Latin-B and Latin Extended character sets required for Pāḷi, so font creators like myself and Professor KR Norman used the code-points in the Latin-1 Supplement character set to encode the Pāḷi characters. The glyphs for āĀ were encoded to the code-points reserved for æÆ etc.
I no longer distribute these outmoded legacy fonts for Pāḷi. My fonts are now all correctly encoded to the Unicode code-points. Unless you have a lot of obsolete documents that use these out-dated encodings, I strongly recommend uninstalling all the old fonts, and installing Unicode fonts only. Even standard Windows fonts like Calibri and Times New Roman now contain the extended characters required for Pāḷi.
Legacy documents can be updated by macros to find and replace æ with ā, and so forth.
Many thanks,
Unfortunately I still need these old fonts because I still get documents that use them. I make epub versions of books that were originally printed in pre-unicode days. That requires changing all the non-unicode chars to unicode characters.
I hoped that MainType would help to distinguish these non-unicode fonts, other than by just remembering the names.
