Using advanced Unicode features

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William
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Using advanced Unicode features

Post by William »

Something which I find rather puzzling is the way that whether one can use advanced OpenType features on a Windows PC depends very much upon which version of Windows is running. For example, it appears that the glyph substitution capabilities of an OpenType font cannot be used on a Windows 95 or Windows 98 PC because the operating system does not support that feature of OpenType.

On the face of it, and do please correct me if I have got it wrong, it appears to me that there is no reason why the glyph substitution features of OpenType could not be used on a Windows 95 or Windows 98 PC if there were an application program, written, say, in C, which accessed the data in the font file and did its own rendering within a graphics environment. Such an application program, which could also be used on more modern PCs, could open up the possibilities of using those features of Unicode which are not currently available on some PCs.

Is this correct?

William Overington

28 September 2004
Erwin Denissen
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Post by Erwin Denissen »

As far as I know installing either Internet Explorer 5 or higher or Office 2000 or higher should also install the Unicode Script Processor (USP10.dll). This processor is also know as Uniscribe and should enable OpenType support.
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Post by sevry7 »

Erwin Denissen wrote:As far as I know installing either Internet Explorer 5 or higher or Office 2000 or higher should also install the Unicode Script Processor (USP10.dll). This processor is also know as Uniscribe and should enable OpenType support.
Unicode is supported in Win98, though there might be certain codes/cells that don't respond (I'm not sure). But a character entity/numeric entity like & #12456; should show any glyph you have in that cell in IE 6, in Win98.

By "support", did you mean full support for these opentype fonts? Isn't it true that such an older OS won't support opentype extended features? Wouldn't it just treat such a font, with a .ttf extension or not, as just a standard TT font? And, if so, it would be missing those extended features, which seem to be the real selling point of opentype (maybe not its reason for being but close to that), which make it possible to spell words with the proper letters, and which can also then be properly searched, but which also automatically, according to conditions/rules designed by the maker, will display or print any ligatures or substitutions from other cells for some of those letters, as if those ligatures and substitutions had been directly specified in the text, as they would be with Unicode.
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Post by Erwin Denissen »

Right now there are only a few applications that support OpenType features, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator and (although it doesn't support all features) Adobe PhotoShop.

These links might help:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/intro.htm
http://www.myfonts.com/info/opentype-su ... lications/

I hope this answers all your questions.
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Post by sevry7 »

Erwin Denissen wrote:Right now there are only a few applications that support OpenType features, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator and (although it doesn't support all features) Adobe PhotoShop.

These links might help:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/intro.htm
http://www.myfonts.com/info/opentype-su ... lications/
Also see on Avalon - and the new Longhorn/Vista OS from MS later this year:

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/200 ... t_typ.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us ... obeta1.asp (a brief note toward the end)
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