#73 Multiple font needs . . .
Some of my data is in Khmer. Some of it uses IPA characters (phonetic extensions). And of course Basic Latin and what not.
None of the fonts that have Khmer and Basic Latin have IPA characters.
On my old laptop (I'm in the process of transferring to a new machine), I chose DejaVu as my font and Khmer characters were automagically displayed in my preferred Khmer font, Daun Penh. DejaVu has the IPA characters necessary.
On the new machine, no such magic. Choosing Arial Unicode, DejaVu Sans, Daun Penh, KhmerOS Freehand, Tahoma, all the fonts I use sometimes or other, I do not see all the fonts necessary.
I know that one fix is to get one font that has all the characters I need. (I haven't succeeded in persuading any of the font designers to do that -- just adding six or eight characters to the Khmer fonts would do it.) That's the direction I'm headed now.
But it would be useful if XCE could do what Firefox can do -- let me choose what font I want to use depending on the Unicode section. Then I could choose different fonts for the English and Khmer.
And of course, this would truly allow for multilingual texts -- Chinese and Gujurati could co-exist with the other languages without requiring a super-sized font.
Babel Map (a free utility) lets one define a "composite" font, specifying the display of different fonts for different Unicode sections ("if the Unicode character falls in the range U+1780-17F0 then use KhmerOS Freehand").
This is a heck of a lot more detailed than Firefox's Advanced Fonts & Colors control, which on my system has 24 options, like Western, Central European, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Hebrew, etc. (Khmer is among them on my computer, but that's not standard, so I think it's affected by my having installed a Khmer keyboard driver). More detailed than may be necessary. Just being able to choose different fonts for different scripts in Firefox is sufficient for everything I can see (as long as I use a font with all the appropriate Western extensions, like IPA . . .).
Anyway, I know this is a stretch. Most of the programming editors I've seen restrict you to a single font (or a single font per document type).
That's one reason I've found my way to XCE, because of its Unicode friendliness. I think, though, to really be Unicode friendly, it'll have to take another step.
Thanks,
Roger Sperberg
A true believer in XCE since Jan 2007
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Thanks Roger, that makes perfect sense. I need to learn a lot more about fonts before I can address this problem I think. In terms of interface, I'm not sure how to handle this, but I appreciate that having to change the font via Tools>Options>Editor>dropdown is not an acceptable solution!
The next release will focus on Linux bugs I think (the clipboard behaves in very strange and unexpected ways at the moment) and I'll also try to make the program Vista-friendly (I'm told it runs but I've finally got a Vista comp so I can try it out myself).
Best wishes,
Gerald
PS The alert is still broken, hence the delay in getting back to you! Need to look into this asap.
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I appreciate that (1) this isn't something that comes up for many people; (2) most text editors are restricted to a single font; and (3) finding one font for all the Unicode sections I need would obviate the problem and so I should really pursue that solution.
Nonetheless, I hope you are able eventually to effect something like the Firefox solution.
Thanks,
Roger