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

[Chris Little]

> 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).

In Win2000 (at least--but I hope this is the case for Win9x also), fonts
will be switched automatically by the operating systems to Unicode fonts
that support the correct range for a given character.  So, even if you
have the font set to "Times New Roman", if you try to display Chinese
text, Windows will change the font to "MingLiU".  In Win2000, it's a
piece of cake to get this working, but I don't know how to do it in
Win98--so that I can explain the process to people having problems.
 
> 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.

Windows has Unicode Greek & Hebrew support in its own fonts.  They're
actually part of Windows 2000's version of Times New Roman.  For wider
Unicode support, we use Code2000 (typically), Arial Unicode MS, or
CyberBit.  Code2000, for example, is the only font I know that supports
the full set of Unicode 3.0 Hebrew codepoints that we need for the BHS.

--Chris