Unicode - AAT vs OT fonts in Revolution

[Sivakatirswami]

Richmond:

My crazy "dream" would be to have a revApplet that runs in a browser 
and/or a desktop client that accesses Tamil-Devanagari (you're right I 
had the spelling wrong) data from the web server in flat files, or 
possibly in a dBase... loads the text, edit and sends it back to the 
server, then can be imported into Indesign, emails etc.  works on all 
platforms...

I have also done the indic-text-as-images on web pages, but there are 
enough mandates for edits, portability, interactivity that no longer 
works, and the mandate now for all kinds of reasons: moving forward, the 
data must be in unicode.

If you *do* manage to build a OT-TTF-Unicode font for Devanagari that 
works in Rev on both Windows and Mac I would be very, very interested. 
I'm sure it would probably work in Windows too.

As for keyboards: if you can, stick with standards: on the Mac, there's 
the Devanagari QWERTY and also the Devanagari (which follows a pattern 
based on the Devanagari alphabet)  I can send those to you if you need 
them. Only thing (argh!) both fail to offer key input for udatta and 
anudatta (stress marks, 0951, 0952) and the only environment that you 
can use to pick them is from the Glyphs palette in InDesign. If you are 
inputting into Pages or MSword, there is no input method for those to 
chars, which are mission critical...


 from Richmond Mathewson wrote:
> 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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