Re: [NTLK] [ANN] Greek Font (preliminary version)

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Sun Jun 09 2002 - 08:07:33 EDT


Date: Sat, 8 Jun 2002 19:49:32 -0700 (PDT)
From: Daedalus Guy <daedalus_guy_at_mac.com>

>As for the two Greek fonts you pointed out--the one he uses in the
>PDF really looks bad

Indeed.

>I've never seen the Athenian font you mentioned (and I remember
>scouring just about all the Newton websites looking for one a couple
>years ago). Is it at UNNA? I think I've checked there and haven't
>seen it.

I realized that I don't have it, although I vaguely remember deleting
it from my Newton :(
Ask Joel Watson, he very probably has it.
I think it's just the Athenian Font for MacOS converted to NewtonOS.
Athenian font is free (try google) and is the Font used within the
Perseus project. However, as you point it, it is not sure that one
can convert it to NewtonOS and/or distribute the result.

>Finally, I'm a bit hazy about the Unicode thing. I tried to
>understand what Unicode actually is (in practical terms) by reading
>through the materials provided by Apple's Font Group, but it's kind
>of like wading through a paper on atomic physics--far too technical
>and detailed to be of much use to me. I mean, I'm still not exactly
>sure what Unicode is--is it a font encoding method? Is it for
>mapping characters to keys? What I really need is a simple
>introduction as to what Unicode is, and then **a detailed
>explanation of how to make a font using it.** It looks like the PDF
>you provided might have some info on this.

I'm not sure that this PDF is the best introduction to Unicode.
You'd better want to have a look at:
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html

On NewtonOS, characters are encoded using UCS-2 mapped to 16 bits
(this is *not* UTF-16 and NewtonOS's version of Unicode is somehow
limited, but it's just that it was implemented before the creation of
surrogates).

NewtonOS font system (inherited from QuickDraw) supports MacRoman and
Unicode encodings. You cannot code more than the 256 characters you
have on MacOS with MacRoman encodings (hence the name), and in
theory, you cannot code Greek characters except beta, mu, capital and
lowercase delta, capital sigma, capital and lowercase pi, capital
omega.

On the contrary, in Unicode, you can code all the Greek characters
including some you probably don't have in your font since there are
more than 256 of them.
They are within 0370-03FF and 1F00-1FFF. You can see the charts there:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf

The interest of having your font mapped to Unicode is that without
much work you could import/export texts in Greek. However, you
wouldn't be able to type it with the keyboard. Let's say that if you
make a Unicode version of your font, I'll take the time to design an
input method for it ;)

The work to do is to replace the current cmap table with a Unicode
one (in format 4 and 6, NewtonOS doesn't support other formats
allowing Unicode). You could have both encodings in a single font,
but I don't suggest this because the same character would be encoded
in different ways which would confuse the user (i.e. let's say you
search for alpha, you would only get the occurrences of the alpha
encoded the way you typed it in the search box although it would look
like the other one).
Cf: http://developer.apple.com/fonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6cmap.html

Paul

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