Unicode test

[Michael Quinion]

Joel S. Berson wrote:

> I never even thought of changing my font!  To me, as someone once
> involved in code set standards and support, character sets and fonts
> should be independent things, with "font" meaning only what the
> characters look like.  But I'm now reminded that in actual
> implementation that's not the case -- a given font may not provide all
> the characters of an encoding.

I agree about the confusion attached to the meaning of "font".

Unless Eudora installs its own font sets, which I'm not sure it does, the
fonts available will be those of the basic operating system. In the US and
European Windows XP standard installation, for example, Arial Unicode MS
includes both Chinese and Japanese; MS Mincho has Japanese. The Arial font
is huge and has nearly everything in it. No other font installed as
standard has either script.

I'm sensitised to this issue because, not least, of needing a font that
includes the IPA extensions set. The only two on Windows XP that do are
Lucinda Sans Unicode and MS Mincho.


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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