Good afternoon,
I wasn't quite sure where to place this question since I could not find a newsgroup dedicated to globalization. If somebody knows a place where I should be posting instead, please let me know.
I am in the process of changing an application to support East Asian languages as well. In the process of research I have run across various ways that fonts are substituted or linked (e.g., MS Shell Dlg 2) and have also read much about OpenType fonts. I have been unable to gain a clear understanding of how OpenType fonts handle the extended characters needed for East Asian languages. My understanding at this time is that an OpenType font can, for a given missing UNICODE glyph, have an internal directive towards a font that does have the glyph in question (not referrring to the Font Linking that Windows does through the registry, but referring to something internal to the OpenType Font itself).
Microsoft provides Times New Roman, Arial, Lucida, and Courier New as OpenType fonts. What is the process by which these fonts find substitutes for missing glyphs?
Thank you!
--
James
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After I submitted my original post, I remembered that Windows systems provide a "Private Character Editor" utility (eudcedit.exe), via which you can add your own characters to individual fonts, or to 'all' fonts.
I don't know how the 'add to all' mechanism works, but if you only have a few glyphs which you want to provide as a default, it may be worth investigating this utility.
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by: DansDadUKPosted on 2009-06-26 at 06:40:51ID: 24720810
I've not heard of the glyph substitution which you refer to.
I doubt that this mechanism exists, since it implies that you must have available a font which contains (potentially) any glyph - and I believe that the current Unicode standard defines well in excess of 60000 characters.
The only common font which I'm aware of which includes a large number of glyphs is the "Arial Unicode MS" font, which includes over 50000 glyphs.
What TrueType (and the 'superset' OpenType) fonts do provide is the concept of 'galley characters', which allow the font designer to define one or more characters, in each individual font, which will be used if the font does not include a glyph at the required codepoint.
Note that in TTF and OTF fonts, all characters are indexed by Unicode codepoint.
Some fonts will not include a galley character; some will include just one 'global' galley character; and others may include several such characters, different ones to be used for different Unicode ranges.
The recommended shape of the global galley character is an unfilled rectangle.
The Unicode organisation (http://www.unicode.org) provide a 'font of last resort' which contains dozens (if not hundreds) of galley characters for different ranges - but that is all.