Which Windows version
David J. Perry
perryd at telocity.com
Sat Dec 21 11:07:55 EST 2002
Scripsit Alex Hopkins:
> What of the uncertainty dot under doubtful letters used in
> the transcription of papyrus texts, or the lunate sigma - are
> these supported?
Lowercase lunate sigma has been in Unicode for a while at U+03F2, and an
uppercase version was proposed by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and is
now in the process of obtaining final approval. (It was initially
approved by the Unicode Technical Committee in November and by WG2 in
December--WG2 is the committee that oversees additions to ISO 10646, the
international standard that is developed in paralle with Unicode.) It
will be at U+03F9.
The underdot situation is more complex. Unicode contains a combining
underdot, U+0323. The problem is that Windows does not yet handle
combining marks well; if the font designer positions the dot to fit
under an "average" width character, the dot will not position correctly
under characters that are narrower or wider than average. So you have
to use the character spacing controls in your word processor or page
layout program to get it to look right, which is a royal pain.
There have been indications from Microsoft that Uniscribe, the Windows
component that handles glyph processing, may be updated to handle
combining marks in Latin / Greek / Cyrillic. No official announcement
about when, though. The lack of support for combining marks is a major
problem for multilingual users in Windows (Mac OS X does them just
fine). I personally hope that this update may take place with the next
release of Office, but that is _not_ based on anything official.
There are number of other polytonic fonts available in addition to those
that George mentioned. See http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/index.html
for an excellent list of Unicode resources, including fonts. One other
font is Gentium, http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/ .
David
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