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?

> 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...


       Thorsten

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