Unicode - AAT vs OT fonts in Revolution

[Richmond Mathewson]

Hmm, I had a similar problem about 4 years ago when I had to dish out
a lot of Cyrillic text. HOWEVER, as the text was STATIC (i.e. none of the
end users were expected to interact with it) after an awful lot of
headache-causing experiments I just typed out the texts and then
embedded them into the stacks as IMAGES.

By-the-by, isn't the first writing system 'Devanagari' rather than 
'Devenagiri'?
something to do with snakes, methinks.  :)

Also, having dug out my McDonell Sanskrit dictionary and attempting to check
the meaning of a few words from the Rg-Veda (in my Vedic Reader) I fell foul
of the fact that Vedic (as opposed to classical Sanskrit) uses a larger
Devanagari alphabet than Sanskrit (about 4 more letters) - those extra 
letters
are not, as far as I know - included in Unicode (which, I think, bases its
Devanagari on Hindi).

So, hmm, faut de meux, if you are going to quote shruti or smriti I would
be inclined to stick to pictorial representations of text.

Now, there are some reasonably respectable TTF unicode fonts "out there"
that contain Nagari letters, so I don't think it is necessary to "get 
all worked up"
about other 'funny' types of fonts.

Umm, sorry, got to rush off and see my accountant (monthly ritual) and
then teach Modal Verbs (Aargh), however, this evening will try and give
this a spot more thought and get back to you.

Shanti.

Sivakatirswami wrote:
> I'm interesting in deploying some apps that use Devanagiri and Tamil 
> Unicode text, and making them appear correctly on both Windows and 
> Apples machines.
>
> I'm just beginning the foray into the unicode world in InDesign after 
> waiting for several years for InDesign to get up to speed. Today it 
> has, well, almost. By using IndicPlus plug in, (fabulous and only 
> $20.00) we can now display OT (Open Type) unicode Indic fonts in 
> InDesign.
>
> But of course, I want to use RunRev Stacks -- it's more fun for 
> users... (smile)
>
> The issue will be: Apple's use of the Atsui rendering engine which 
> will only properly display AAT unicode fonts (Apple Advance 
> Typographical) fonts. Meanwhile on Windows uses its own rendering 
> engine and unicode fonts must have OT Tables. At the Mac developer 
> conference recently, one top IT man from Malaysia who was there said 
> that Apple will probably not move form it's position in sticking with 
> AAT fonts, and for good reason. Apparently Window messed up with 
> OneScribe engine and now users are having trouble (it works one way on 
> XP, another on Vista and some valid OT fonts are not rendering 
> properly at all on Vista). Meanwhile Adobe has clearly made decision 
> to write code for windows first and mac second, and for some reason 
> obstinately continues to lag behind in the rendering of AAT fonts, 
> even when Windows is starting to... end of sob story... some of you 
> must know it well already.
>
> My assumption is: and please correct me if I am wrong: Revolution will 
> use the Atsui engine on the Mac to render Unicode fonts and therefore, 
> only AAT fonts will display properly. Meanwhile, that same stack, if 
> it were put on a  Windows machine, will only work by calling a 
> different OT unicode font. Second assumption is that the work around 
> for dealing with this incompatibility issue would be to check for the 
> platform and then call a different font for the fields being use to 
> display text. This assumes that the unicode will be the same 
> regardless of the font or rendering environment.
>
> but then, we have the old problem: will the user have the necessary 
> fonts on his system? Ideally we could carry the fonts in the stacks 
> themselves, but my understanding is that Rev embedded font capability 
> is limited to True Type fonts and not AAT fonts or OT fonts. So it 
> will mean either storing a font in a custom prop and then offering it 
> to the user to install (one for Mac and one for Win)  or send them 
> URL's with instructions to download and install those fonts.
>
> I'm hoping I'm wrong about this and that before I go down that road, 
> someone will tell us what brilliant solution they have for dealing 
> with this in Revolution. For Japanese, Chinese someone must have faced 
> all these issues already.
>
> Danyavad - Thank you
> Sivakatirswami
>
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