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

[Richmond]

On 28/03/17 12:17, Mark Waddingham via use-livecode wrote:
> On 2017-03-28 10:30, Richmond via use-livecode wrote:
>> In 1996 I bought a copy of Fontographer, having previously developed
>> several bitmap fonts
>> for Macintosh with Fontastic (for Anglo-Saxon and Old Slavic). At that
>> time (1996) it was possible
>> to use Fontographer to make fonts with about 4000 characters which one
>> could access through Mac Keyboard layouts. As far as I know, although
>> Unicode development started in 1986, there was
>> no question of Unicode compatibility (and I had not heard of Unicode).
>>
>> Presumably (?) ALL that Macintosh system 7.5 was doing when it
>> displayed characters outwith the ASCII set was what I need now?
>
> Not necessarily - I believe system 7.5 was pretty advanced when it 
> came to text and fonts. In particular, I'm sure it had an 
> implementation of TrueType at least. The only difference then was that 
> a font might have multiple CMAP tables for different text encodings as 
> the Unicode encoding was still in its infancy. Even bitmap fonts 
> (which might not necessarily have been TrueType) would have to declare 
> what encoding it assumed was being used so that things could be mapped 
> appropriately.
>
> In actual fact, fonts don't really care about encoding exactly - they 
> provide tables which map indexes in an encoding to the glyphs to 
> represent them. Everything inside the font runs on glyph indexes and 
> not codepoints in any encoding. Indeed (as I mentioned in another 
> email) you can use the PUA area for your font as a direct 
> codepoint->glyph map.
>
>> I'm glad you find it unusable: I have a G5 iMac (connects to the
>> Internet using TenFourFox) running
>> dual-boot 10.4 and 10.5 that is stuffed with lots of PPC software that
>> I bought when I had more money for that sort of thing than I have now:
>> I would be lost without the availability of Appleworks and
>> Bryce.
>
> I'd point out that TenFourFox is a fork of FireFox and is not a 
> Mozilla project.

Is that a point that anyone who is prepared to go on running a PPC Mac 
should
be worried about?

The same goes for Classilla on my OS 9 G3 iMac :)

My original point was that I feel the word "unusable" is a way too 
strong way of saying "not
up-to-date in the least".

I'm NOT going to make Amazon purchases with my Debit card on my G3 iMac!

I have a friend who drives a 1980 Lada: it's great because as its 
incredibly "primitive" not having
any on board computers anything that goes wrong can generally be sorted 
out with a spanner,
a soldering iron and a few vulgar words.

>
> i.e. A third-party has taken the responsibility for maintaining a fork 
> of an open-source project to ensure there is a variant of FireFox 
> which runs on older systems...

I set up a Macintosh 5400 running system 9 and a series of standalones 
hived off LC/RR 2
derived from my EFL stacks for a chap in a village near here to help the 
kids at a Syrian
refugee camp: certainly a bit ancient, but not unusable. The kids are 
smiling, and learning
basic English vocabulary so they can work out how to become illegal 
migrants into Britain and
vote for Theresa May . . . or something.

Found a donor who is shipping us 12 more PPC all-in-ones running system 
9 . . . . cool; whatever works.

>
> Warmest Regards,
>
> Mark.
>

Best, Richmond.