[sword-devel] Unicode fonts on Win95/98/98SE/Me

[skip gaede]

Chris,

I have a fair amount of experience with fonts and with converting texts to 
use various fonts. The problems I see are lack of widely available unicode 
fonts, especially for displaying greek and hebrew, and proper display of 
the fonts in a browser. Microsoft released a good unicode-capable font with 
Windows 2000: I think it is called Palatino Linotype, and Netscape 
(Mozilla) distributes several Open TrueType fonts (unicode capable).

Most fonts (including Symbol) do not support unicode, so if sword wants to 
use unicode, we'll have to find some, especially ones that support Greek 
and Hebrew.

There was also a question raised about installing fonts under Windows. This 
is fairly straight forward:

1) unzip the file containing the fonts to a temporary directory.
2) In the Control Panel, select the Fonts widget and choose 'Install new 
font...' under the File menu.
3) Navigate to where the new fonts are, and choose copy fonts to the font 
folder.

After existing the Fonts app, you may delete the temporary directory and 
the zip file if you want to.

I may have misunderstood the question. Perhaps the question was how to 
programatically install fonts. If so, I have no clue.

Blessings,
Skip

-----Original Message-----
From:	Chris Little [SMTP:chrislit@chiasma.org]
Sent:	Tuesday, September 18, 2001 11:53 PM
To:	sword-devel@crosswire.org
Subject:	Re:[sword-devel] Unicode fonts on Win95/98/98SE/Me


> The font that windows has is "Symbol" font.  According to what I 
understand (and I admit that most of this is Greek to me) that font is not 
mapped to unicode.
>
> I know that Logos uses fonts sold to them by Lingusist Software.  Or 
rather they used to use them - they changed the fonts used by their Greek 
books several years back.
>
> On-Line Bible (OLB) also uses a special Greek font.
>
> I would be glad to upload (or attach) copies of those fonts for 
development use.

We're committed to using Unicode because it's a good standard, it allows
reliable searching, etc.  There is a way to install Greek (and Hebrew,
Chinese, etc.) fonts on Win9x, as opposed to the Symbol font, which is
intended for use in mathematical and other formulae--I just don't know
the specific mechanism for installing them. :(

I'll look into it and install Win98 on an old computer if no one posts a
method by the weekend.

--Chris

<feature request-related replies follow in a separate response>