Re: Off topic: type

[Emery Snyder emery.snyder@xxxxxxxx]

The "standard Word set" = the fonts included by default with (some
version of) Word. You can use other fonts in your documents, but how
readers will see it depends on what fonts they have UNLESS you choose
the option to "embed TrueType fonts" in your document (which can be
done from the options menu).

That usually fixes things for Word documents within Windows; I'm not
sure it works with moving stuff from Windows to Mac (I can experiment
if someone wants).

Unfortunately there seems to be no provision for embedding PostScript
fonts.

And unfortunately XyWin, because of XyWrite's excellent
practice of using marked-up text rather than a proprietary binary
format, apparently cannot embed fonts in a document. (Though you could
always send them along as an attachment.)

The main problem if a user doesn't have your fonts is what happens to
characters not contained in the system's default character set
("foreign" characters, ligatures, small cap, etc.), since the default
character set (usually Windows version of ANSI 8859-1) has only the
most common characters for a particular region.

If I really care about the display of a document, I print it to a PDF
file (where you can also choose to embed the fonts, either the whole
thing or just the characters you use).

The advantage of Unicode is that it provides one big character set
that includes most graphemes, so at least the recipient can figure out
what character you MEANT to have occur at a given place in the
document by checking what number appears there, even if she can't see
it in the display.

I second the praise of the linguist list!

On 1.2.2003, Patricia M Godfrey wrote:
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> Many thanks for all your leads. The Linguist list tells me the standard
> Word set doesn't include it, but also gave me a lead to a font that does,
> so I will investigate all. Ironic, no? We can produce all sorts of
> "foreign" accented characters (and don't get me wrong, that's a Good
> Thing), but not our own ancestral characters. By the by, Linguist
> (www.linguistlist.org) is a great resource for this sort of thing:
> someone there graciously solved a problem in Italian use of accents for
> me a few years back, and they have on-line dictionaries, of which Lewis
> and Short's Latin one just now supplied me with much-needed evidence that
> a Latin form that the author claimed to have gotten from Cassell's was
> nonsense. (Yes, I know, awful sentence.) Thanks again.
> Patricia

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