Subject: Unicode Fonts in Win98 Again
From: Lukas Pietsch (pietsch@mail.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: Fri Dec 29 2000 - 13:15:00 CST
While you guys are at it, here's another fresh mystery from the
weird and wonderful world of Windows workarounds for Unicode. I
don't know if it's related to the display issues I raised last
time.
If you have Windows language support packs installed (e.g. for
Greek), Windows will create codepage-specific "logical fonts"
from Unicode fonts system-wide, by adding entries in Win.ini.
For instance:
[FontSubstitutes]
Arial Greek,161=Arial,161
This is just for dumb applications that can't handle Unicode
fonts themselves. Unicode-aware applications typically ignore
these. (In MSWord the user will see only one "Arial" font in the
font selection box.)
However, many applications use these logical font names in rtf
format when they export or copy to the clipboard. Even MSWord
does. For instance, this is how Word exports the character
sequence αβ&gamma in rtf:
{\f62\fswiss\fcharset161\fprq2 Arial Greek;}
{\f62\lang1032 \'e1\'e2\'e3}
A Unicode-aware application at the receiving end should be aware
that "Arial Greek" is just an alias for "Arial", and should use
"Arial" when importing. MSWord does. AbiWord 0.7.12 doesn't. It
stores this as:
<c props="color:000000; font-family:Arial Greek; font-size:10pt;
font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; text-decoration:none;
text-position:normal">áâã</c>
(And then, probably because it doesn't find a physical "Arial
Greek" font in the system, it fails to even display the
characters as Greek, but uses cp1252 Arial instead :-< )
-----------------------------------------------------
Lukas Pietsch
University of Freiburg
English Department
Phone (p.) (#49) (761) 696 37 23
mailto:pietsch@mail.uni-freiburg.de
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