🚀 go-pugleaf

Aandi, thanks again for your further explanation.

Up front, I will say that there is no need to respond to this -- I am just decrying the "state of the art".

I realize that:

(a) we're caught in a "technology transform" where Unicode has created expectations that are still far from being met in practical applications (for various reasons), and

(b) there are different ways to achieve a desired result (for example, glyphs versus what I would call "character-generated processing instructions", or what you would say is the typographic program doing the typography).

As an example of (a), I have searched for years for a truly competent Unicode text editor, and I have yet to find one. I have tried many, and UltraEdit is the closest thing to fulfilling my needs, but as of a year ago, it still exhibited too many bugs and limitations for me to use, particularly when trying to search and replace Unicode characters using regular expressions. I fall back on using a byte-oriented editor and putting up with using the UTF-8 encodings for the multi-byte characters in my XML files, and learning to read wierd-looking character groupings as something meaningful. It's reminiscent of reading hex memory dumps from an IBM mainframe in 1969, and being able to fairly adeptly interpret assembly language instruction codes in them. (NOT my idea of fun, in either case!)

I relate this to the state of the art in the font industry at the moment.

Obviously, it is not difficult to add support for the space glyphs in a downloaded font, particularly a TrueType font (and I presume a PostScript Type 2 font, and an OpenType font). It is there in MS Arial Unicode, and the space glyphs work fine in the Antenna House application. Trouble is, we don't want Arial, we want Times.

So I accept your explanations, but they don't really explain why someone -- like Adobe or Microsoft -- isn't doing more to fill the void for Unicode characters in many "standard" fonts. I'm not necessarily talking about full Unicode support, but at least for Latin-alphabet languages -- why should a user have to change fonts just to deal with all those languages which have such a similar base? For example, a somewhat-expanded version of Times New Roman that does this would seem to be trivial to provide, and very useful.

(In fact, I would think that the European Union would be pressing for an expanded version of that, including Greek and probably now Cyrillic characters -- with all that they spend on other esoterica, it would be an insignificant expense. Perhaps they have had this done already for numerous fonts -- but probably not, because they're not that well-organized and probably aren't even making extensive use of Unicode yet. ;-))

And of course even applications that are supposedly Unicode-capable underneath, like MS Office, are not really capable in the user interface, so we've got a long way to go.

As someone who has struggled with supporting just the English and French languages from DOS days in the 1980s, including keyboard support as well as printing and application support, I can say that the amount of time that is still taken up with trying to resolve these sorts of problems around the world is absolutely mind-boggling. Yet the cost of resolving them via decent Unicode support would be trivial in comparison. And computer speed, memory and storage space are no longer significant considerations, nor is bandwidth, especially with UTF-8 for Latin-alphabet languages. It is very frustrating!

One can always hope that there is hope for the future!

Ed Hicks