Problem with Norman Fonts

[John Smith]

On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Frank Snow wrote:

> The Norman font uses #160 for lowercase t with dot under. This is where
> Windows expects the non-breaking space to be. AFAIK, there is no good
> solution other than to switch to a different font encoding.
>
> Frank Snow
> fsnow at iname.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Francois Voegeli <l50948 at SAKURA.KUDPC.KYOTO-U.AC.JP>
>
> >It seems that the latest version of Word in the Office suite does not
> >recognize the non-breakable space when I use these fonts, a thing which
> >has very bad side effects.
>

The original poster did not say which version of Norman she was using or
where she got it from, but the log for my ftp server suggests that it may
have been the version I released fairly recently. This report is bad news,
because it suggests that (surprise, surprise) Microsoft have introduced an
incompatible change into the behaviour of Word. Earlier PC versions simply
ignored any character defined at position 160 and put in a non-breaking
space, unlike Macintosh versions, which would insert the character.
Additionally, the two architectures use a different "slot" for
non-breaking space: PC uses 160, Mac uses 202. The fonts I released did
their best to accommodate this awkward state of affairs; but if the latest
version of PC Word now behaves as the poster indicates, that means that
the Norman fonts are not really usable on PCs any more.

Unless there are really strong reasons for wanting to use Norman, I would
suggest switching to the CSX character set, which grew up in the PC world
and does not have these problems. Equivalent fonts for CSX are available
from the same server: connect to the website listed below and follow the
"fonts" link.

John Smith

--
Dr J. D. Smith                *  jds10 at cam.ac.uk
Faculty of Oriental Studies   *  Tel. 01223 335140 (Switchboard 01223 335106)
Sidgwick Avenue               *  Fax  01223 335110
Cambridge CB3 9DA             *  http://bombay.oriental.cam.ac.uk/index.html