Windows 7 and mucking around with Unicode fonts.

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Sat Feb 2 14:40:33 EST 2013


So, got some reasonably negative feedback re my Devawriter Pro
running on Windows 7.
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The feedback seems to be a "Livecode problem" rather than a "Richmond 
problem"

(and I'm sure if I am guilty of passing the buck plenty of people here 
on the Use-List
will leap to put me right)
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So, just installed Windows 7 into VMware player (and I seem to have 
about 2 weeks before I need a reg number).

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and it consists of this:

[bear with me as it involves a Sanskrit font]

Hindi and Sanskrit are NOT written either in the way European languages 
are written (i.e. left-to-right)
or in the way Middle-Eastern languages are written (i.e. right-to-left), 
but in a way which is largely
left-to-right, except some letters are written in 'funny' places:

1. If one wants to write a work such as 'KIT' in Sanskrit the short 'i' 
is written before the 'K'.

2. The short 'i' overhangs the following 'K'.

SO: when my Devawriter is used by an end-user on a Macintosh s/he types 
K-I-T and gets I-K-T (as they should).

When an end-user does this on Windows XP s/he gets exactly the same sort 
of thing as they would get on a Mac.

BUT (and it is a bl**dy big BUT):

On Windows 7 (and possibly on Vista and Windows 8; although haven't had 
the opportunity to test this) they

get I-*-K-T, where '8' is an artifact that looks rather like a sort of 
perforated circle.

On export to HTML the text renders CORRECTLY, but on export to RTF it 
does NOT; obviously export to PNG and JPG images
are a truckload of cough-cough-cough.
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Furthermore; Windows 7 appears to go in for font substitution:

My Devawriter uses its own Devawriter.ttf font lovingly crafted by moi, 
that contains a large number of 'awkward' glyphs in
the first Personal Private Use area of the Unicode convention.

Inside Windows 7, Devawriter Pro retains my glyphs from the PPU area, 
but substitutes the standard Hindi glyphs with
Hindi glyphs from one of its own, inbuilt fonts.
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Obviously this situation is NOT GOOD; so; 2 questions:

1. Is it possible to enforce things so that Windows 7 doesn't substitute 
glyphs [don't even begin to understand
this as the textFont is set for the output field]

2. Is there a way to get Unicode fonts to behave 'as they should' inside 
LC inside Windows 7?

Anybody who is interested can mail me off-list and I will send them a 
zip file of screenshots of the problem.

I am running LC 4.5.

Richmond.




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