LiveCode's handling of Unicode glyphs being dependent on the underlying OS

[Richmond Mathewson]

*Mark Waddingham_wrote:_ <mailto:mark at livecode.com> *
> snip
> I suspect OpenOffice does its own (bespoke) font layout and rendering which is
> why it 'does something there'. However, whether or not what it does is
> 'correct', is another matter.
>
>
snip

Of course the "nasty" question to ask at this point
is why LiveCode IS dependent for Unicode handling on the underlying OS
and is unable to do its own internal processing.

While I'm on a "nasty" streak this page needs to be sorted out: 
http://lessons.livecode.com/m/4071/l/20441-unicode
as it makes no mention of *numToCodepoint*.

Here, Fraser says something about Unicode: 
*https://livecode.com/tag/unicode/

"*Those of you who have been paying attention to my previous blog posts 
(if you exist!) will have heard me mention that to convert between Text 
and Binary you need to use textEncode and textDecode. With these 
functions, you specify an encoding. But when the engine does it 
automatically, what encoding does it use?

"The answer is the "native" encoding of the OS on which LiveCode is 
running. This means "CP1252" on Windows, "MacRoman" on OSX and iOS and 
"ISO-8859-1" on Linux and Android. All of these platforms fully support 
Unicode these days but these were the traditional encodings on these 
platforms before the Unicode standard came about. LiveCode keeps these 
encodings for backwards-compatibility."

[ Oh, and Yes, Fraser, I, at least, have read your blog posts with great 
interest. ]

So, LiveCode keeps encodings for bw compat., but penalises people who 
would like to be forward compatible; at least in the ability to
run off standalones that will function on later instantiations of 
operating systems, and to that end making sure that these things show
up on the older operating systems.

Of course one of the easier ways round this is to withdraw support for 
earlier OSes . . .

But as the documentation for LiveCode 8.1.3 states:

T        The Mac engine supports:
             10.6.x (Snow Leopard) on Intel
             10.7.x (Lion) on Intel
             10.8.x (Mountain Lion) on Intel
             10.9.x (Mavericks) on Intel
             10.10.x (Yosemite) on Intel
             10.11.x (El Capitan) on Intel
             10.12.x (Sierra) on Intel

             something is not quite right.

Richmond.