Talk:Arial Unicode MS

Bugs

I'm not sure that the examples given in the "Bugs" section have been typed in correctly. I was under the impression that the double-character diacritics are supposed to appear after both characters, rather than between them. For example:

"Latin Small Letter K" + "Latin Small Letter P" + "Combining Double Inverted Breve" = kp͡

The above works fine for me on WinXP SP1, in Firefox 1.0.6, with Arial Unicode MS 1.00 (according to Windows Font Viewer).

The examples under "Bugs" are all of the form letter, mark, letter. If my understanding is correct, the font engine is doing exactly what it's supposed to -- render the diacritic over the preceding letter, and the space before that letter.

Signed,
R. M. Harman
Linguist and Software Engineer
iTAP Product Team, Motorola
(apologies for being a newbie at using discussion pages; I probably am not formatting things all that well)

hmm this needs to be checked with the unicode standard. Plugwash 22:02, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I just sent the following message to unicode.org through thier contact form:

whilst http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch02.pdf#G1708 doesn't mention double diacritics (e.g. U+035C) specificially it seems to imply that they should go after both characters.

however http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf seems to imply that they should be placed between the two characters they combine with.

which is correct?

-- Plugwash 23:23, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

and the reply i have just received was

Peter,

The information you are looking for is in Section 7.7 of the Unicode Standard version 4.0. You should also look at Section 3.11.

Regards,

---------------------------

Magda Danish

Sr. Administrative Director

The Unicode Consortium

650-693-3921

magda@unicode.org

ok having just read section 7.7 (http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch07.pdf and use the toc) it is made totally unambiguous that combining double diacritics should be placed between the two characters they go over. I am therefore removing the comment from the article.

RM Harman here again. I actually apparently got here at the same time as you, and was going to edit in that I agree with your position on this. I guess I had just been misled by years of doing things the way MS has been doing it. How would you feel about adding in a remark explaining that there's a way to achieve the desired effect -- it's just not standard-compliant? (MS, break standards? Never!)

Done, btw do consider getting an account. its pretty hard to build up a reputation as a good editor if the only way people have to identify you is an ip (which may even change all the time).Plugwash 23:07, 30 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Why rounder glyphs than the original font?

Does anyone know why the glyphs that are in both Arial and Arial Unicode MS are different? Offhand I'd say the Arial Unicode MS glyphs look more Helvetica-like, which makes me wonder if Arial at one time looked much the same, but was made more distinct later. Any info appreciated.—mjb 00:32, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I decided to study the fonts more closely, and I determined that the "rounder glyphs" are actually the same; they're just stretched a bit, mainly horizontally, due to the different font metrics. Arial Unicode MS has different-sized bounding boxes, which the renderer in Windows apparently does not take into account (not that it should be expected to). I added this info to the article.—mjb 10:16, 23 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Just FYI, Arial was originally derived from Helvetica, and was built into MS products presumably because it cost less to license. Auros 21:06, 2 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

availability

The font doesnt appear to be available on the Wayback Machine any longer [1].

I was able to download it at the link provided by the gentoo wiki, which eludes to the fact that the executable moves around a lot, presumably due to cease and desist letters. John Vandenberg 00:38, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This article states several times that Arial Unicode is licensed by Microsoft exclusively to Ascender. I do not believe this is the case now, though it may have been previously. On October 16, 2007, Apple announced on their website that the next version of their flagship operating system, Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard"), would be bundled with Arial Unicode. Interestingly, Leopard is also slated to ship with several other previously Microsoft-only fonts, including Microsoft Sans Serif, Tahoma, and Wingdings. Norville 20:15, 16 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Support for Indian languages

Does Arial Unicode support Indian Languages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mangalkumar (talk • contribs) 05:47, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly Devanagari and Bengali.. AnonMoos (talk) 02:49, 13 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]