Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> In article <38A61393.1B34E800@geocities.com> , "Jon A. Cruz"
> <jon### [at] geocitiescom> wrote:
>
> > It's known. As soon as I get my stuff more cleaned up as far as fallback on
> > cmap goes, the POV-Team will have it to use.
>
> We will?

Yes. I also said "have it to use"  to try to imply that it wouldn't be
necessarily supported by them/you, just that whatever parts of it were deemed
decent could be included. And to also convey that any delays here were due to me,
not the POV-Ray team.


> > BTW, the uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugly way that Apple chose to do fonts up
> > until recently does really bad things with the cmap tables (the part of the
> > TTF file that tells which characters are in the TTF, and where they are
> > located). One font I looked at had 36 different cmap tables in it, and a
> > different one would be used depending on the language of MacOS you are using
> > (i.e. English, spanish, croatian, etc.) even though most of those 36 are for
> > the same encoding.
>
> The original design of TrueType fonts was done by Adobe, not Apple.
> Besides, at least Macs worked for 15 years with other languages than English
> using just using one-bytes characters (not to mention the pre-Unicode
> two-byte character support since System 7).
> Responsible for that limit is surely the ANSI and the original computer
> manufacturers in the 60s or even back in the 50s ignoring the rest of the
> world :-)
> Oh, and remember that TT fonts existed *before* Unicode.  And do I have to
> remind you that switching between languages still does not work in Windows
> 95,98, NT 4.0 ... but there are fewer Chinese, Arabs, Russians, Greek out
> there than offering such support, right?
>
> > even though most of those 36 are for the same encoding.
>
> You may also consider that 36 cmap tables for one-byte fonts are still
> smaller than the 5 MB nonsense of Unicode TT fonts floating around!
> Also, only the lower 128 characters are the same, all others (the upper 128)
> are different somewhere, and you will care about it if you write in that
> language...
>

Well, IIRC, TTF was done by Apple and adopted together with Microsoft to fight
the evil Adobe proprietary Type-1 fonts. The format that became TrueType was
invented by Sampo Kaasila, an Apple engineer, for and at Apple. Apple then got
the short end of the anti-Adobe deal, and MS got to license TTF. Also, at the
same time that Apple was developing TrueType, Apple was also developing Unicode
(or at least key top Apple people were). When MS released their implementation of
TrueType in Windows 3.1, they chose to go for Unicode mapping tables in the font,
whereas Apple decided to stick with their existing "one-user, one-language, one
OS build" model.

For example, if Apple had done things differently, instead of sticking those 36
different mapping table in one font, all with the same encoding, they would have
instead stuck a single Unicode mapping table in and done the language-to-glyph
mapping in the OS, where it belongs. That is just the scheme that they are using
today, but maybe because of inertia and kicking out Steve Jobs, or because of not
wanting to move before publication and not wanting to change later, they didn't
do as much as they could have.

Now, if those TTF files with 36 cmap tables had instead been a unicode mapping
with the glyphs unchanged, it would have ended up a much smaller file. The
problem comes in use when you use the same program with the same data file and
the same TTF file, you can't get the same output unless you get the exact same
language version of the OS installed. Ouch! Especially with all the international
multimedia I've worked with over the years, this was quite annoying. Even more so
when you consider that the Mac was otherwise better to develop graphics and such
on.

Even if I couldn't switch languages in 95, all I had to do was install a Chinese
or Japanese font and the standard versions of software on the English version of
the OS would magically be able to display Japanese or Chinese assets. Wow. So
very helpful. If only Apple would have made their shift a little sooner than they
had. Fortunately they did wake up, and especially since Jobs came back on board
they seem to have gotten back in the game of innovating and catching up where
they had slipped behind.


--
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box" - W.A.Y.

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