#2 Open-Type Variants in PUA Request

[Anonymous]

Junicode is a truly wonderful font, but you would earn the devotion of many of your fans if you could include the Open-type variant characters and additional ligatures at the end of the PUA (...or the beginning of the Supplementary PUA etc...) where folks who are confined to Microsoft Word XP can find and use them. This would make a huge difference. The fact that these would be neither Unicode 5.0 nor MUFI 2.0 wouldn't really matter, since most documents get printed direct to PDF these days anyway, and Junicode can be embedded. I know that Juan-José Marcos includes a lot of stuff from the Supplementary Plane in the PUA of his Alphabetum font for similar reasons. Shall keep my fingers crossed in the hope that it isn't too much work for you to do this with the Open-type variants!

In the meantime, many thanks for 0.6.15.

iipwmuhths@poetic.com

[Peter Baker]

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I am very reluctant to do this. First because the PUA is strongly deprecated by the big standards-setters in fontmaking (Adobe is no longer using the PUA in new fonts and is considering moving characters out of it in future releases of existing fonts; Microsoft Font Validator marks use the the PUA as an error). Second because of the difficulty of finding code points in the PUA that MUFI and others will commit to not using. Third because font designers who go on using the PUA are bailing out programmers (e.g. of Word and OpenOffice) who are failing to deliver advanced typography to the masses.

But I'll think about it.

This is by the way not a support request but a feature request.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

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Sorry about putting my request in the wrong place – realized my error about half a second after clicking on submit! I entirely understand your unwillingness re the PUA. In the meantime, what I'm doing is using the Windows Private Character Editor to borrow your Norse-style thorn (important one for me as I work with both OE and ON) from the PUA of 0.6.8 and put it into a convenient empty spot in the PUA of the current version. As I only print to PDF using embedding and never share raw Word files, this doesn't cause any probs, but it's a bit of a faff and isn't exactly on-message with the comptability ethos of Unicode! As regards MUFI, let's hope they submit a proposal for a Medieval Latin Supplement block within the Unicode Standard before too long.

Thanks again for Junicode. I've been using your fonts ever since the days of Times Old English — back then it was wonderful just to have a supplementary font that included yogh and wynn! How you manage to fit it in around your teaching commitments I shall never know, but I'm impressed.

iipwmuhths@poetic.com