Devanagari

[Kengo Harimoto]

> The reason I asked my original question was because it seemed best to
> start at the most fundamental level in trying to solve the problem with
> the Macs and then move "up" from there. This is at the level of
> encoding. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the Sanskrit 2003 font
> is, technically speaking, not actually a "unicode" font because it does
> not support the standard unicode language assignments for the upper
> values. It takes advantage of the larger font size of the unicode
> standard to overwrite other languages with Sanskrit ligatures and then
> utilizes the widespread software support for the unicode standard to
> display the characters in common programs. This is a good solution and
> one we also used in the bad old days when we only had 256 slots
> available.

I looked inside the Sanskrit 2003 and it is indeed to some degree true.
  But it uses private/corporate use area of the unicode.  So, while it
does not pollute the area meant for other scripts, documents prepared
with Sanskrit 2003 in mind will not work without that font.  This does
not seem very good.

> The reason I mention all of this is that the problem with Macs may be
> due to the Mac also using some of those higher values for Mac "special
> characters" that don't correspond to the PC/Linux values. This was
> something we had to watch out for in the early days as well.

Does it suffice to say that the document prepared on my Mac looks fine
on my PC as well (except for the fact that Windows demands LF/CR for
line ending :)?  Document encodings and rendering of  the data (where
fonts are involved) appear to be very well separated, following the
spirit of unicode on both Windows and OS X.  Let us hope that people
will not start using "special" fonts.

I actually do not see the Mac problem here.   The only major problem
would be that OS X does not support rendering using OpenType font very
well yet.

Oh, I again was only talking about OS X native apps.  Classic Mac OS or
Carbon apps, including MS Word, is entirely a different issue.

--
kengo harimoto