Re: XYWRITE digest 1043

[Nathan Sivin nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

Let me add to Bill Mallon's lament a couple of details. First,
all those European diacritics are fine, but the failing that
probably frustrates most people is the lack of vowels with
macrons (little straight lines across the top) for romanized
Japanese. XyWrite doesn't do them at all.

The second detail has to do with the Word character sets. The
point is that different fonts have different character sets. I
generally use Garamond as my default font (in Windows, the most
attractive version is ClassGaramond BT), but its choice of
characters is limited; no macron. For a decent variety there is
no choice but the boring Times Roman, which also includes Hebrew,
Arabic, Greek, and all sorts of odd stuff. None of the
typographically interesting fonts, e.g., Palatino, Optima, have
adequate character sets. Once again, Microsoft's Least Common
Denominator principle.

Cheers,
--
Nathan Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia PA 19104-6304
(215) 898-7454
nsivin@xxxxxxxx