To: Andrew Cunningham <andrewc(at)vicnet.net.au>
From: Jungshik Shin jshin(at)mailaps.org
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Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 06:14:02 -0400 (EDT)
MIMEVersion: 1.0
ContentType: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Subject: Re: Combining diacriticals and Cyrillic
Body: 

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003, Andrew Cunningham wrote:

> Although the actual application of the theory will differ from operating
> system to operating system.

'OS' here has to be interpreted a bit broadly to include 'APIs and
toolkits' used in text rendering. I guess that's what you meant.

For instance, on Win 9x/ME, MS IE that (appears to) use Uniscribe
APIs directly can render complex scripts but Mozilla that uses
standard Win32 Text APIs (such as TextOut) does not as well (except
for Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil and Korean for which it has built-in
glyph-based solution). The same is true of MacOS X (ATSUI vs
non-ATSUI) and Unix/X11 (pango/Qt vs lowerer-level APIs). And as
you wrote, a version of Mozilla (SILA : http://sila.mozdev.org)
that uses Graphite can render complex scripts well


> 2) You need a rendering system that supports the features. On Windows,
> this means that you will need a version of Uniscribe that supports the
> use of combining diacritics with cyrillic characters. Currently none are
> available, except for the version in the MS Office 2003 Beta. I did a

With this version of Uniscribe (that I don't have) installed, I
guess MS IE 6 and 'non-graphite version' of Mozilla (without
graphite support) work as well. In case of Mozilla, you need to
be on Win 2k/XP (and possibly needs MS Office 2003beta to be
installed.) Could you check that out?

Jungshik