Re: [Freetype] font catalog

[Pavel Kankovsky]

On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Brian Stell wrote:

> > How common are such fonts? Are we talking about widely
> > distributed commercial (or commercial quality) fonts? 
> 
> Yes, widely distributed commercial quality fonts.

You know, "commercial quality" means "we have found enough clueless
customers who would buy it." :)

> For example, on my Microsoft Windows 95 system I have 197 TTF 
> fonts of which 70 have these non-space characters that are blank.

The only font from your list having > 1 blank glyph I have handy is Arial
Black (ARIBLK.TTF) that is supposed to have 10 blank glyphs out of 670.

Let's have a look at Arial Black: there are:
- spaces at U0020 and U00a0 (glyphs #3 and #172),
- a blank character at Uf000 (glyph #210, PS name says "Apple"),
- 9 blank glyphs in Unicode range Uf100-Uf108 (glyphs #305-#313, having
  funny PS names like "noTheta"),
- two other blank glyphs (#1 and #2) not found in the Unicode cmap

This is really wierd. It looks like some sort of censorship.

> Almost half the the cmap is broken. Drawing based on the raw cmap 
> could produce a page with a lot of blank characters.
> 
> I also would prefer to not use broken fonts but I would have a
> hard time telling Japanese Mozilla PC users that while IE can use
> MS Gothic that Mozilla cannot.

Have you tried to figure out where IE gets replacements for those blank
glyphs?

--Pavel Kankovsky aka Peak  [ Boycott Microsoft--http://www.vcnet.com/bms ]
"Resistance is futile. Open your source code and prepare for assimilation."