Re: [Freefont-bugs] OS/2 tables

[Primoz PETERLIN]

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On Tue, 6 May 2003, Josef W. Segur wrote:

> > What could then be the reason that Internet Explorer doesn't offer
> > FreeMono as a Greek font? The CodePageRange table for FreeMono reads
> > "800000bf 00000000", which I interpret as covering Latin 1, Latin 2,
> > Cyrillic, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Windows Baltic and Symbol Character Set
> > pages.
>
> The problem may be caused by that "Symbol Character Set" bit being
> set. I do run Win95 but don't have Internet Explorer, so I can't
> actually check.
> That flag bit is meant for fonts with arbitrary non-Unicode glyphs,
> such as WingDings and WebDings. I suggest clearing it for
> FreeMono.ttf, FreeSans.ttf, and FreeSerif.ttf. The italic, bold, and
> other variants are OK already.

Is it? I thought that the bit should be set if the fonts contains glyphs
from the set of Microsoft "symbol" font. At least both Symbol and
Wingdings fonts have this bit set, while, say, Times and Tahoma do not:

symbol.ttf               CodePageRange=80000000 00000000
tahoma.ttf               CodePageRange=2000009f 00000000
tahomabd.ttf             CodePageRange=2000009f 00000000
times.ttf                CodePageRange=400001ff ffff0000
timesbd.ttf              CodePageRange=400001ff ffff0000
timesbi.ttf              CodePageRange=400001bf dff70000
timesi.ttf               CodePageRange=400001bf dff70000
wingding.ttf             CodePageRange=80000000 00000000

FreeMono.ttf, FreeSans.ttf, and FreeSerif.ttf indeed contain "symbol"
characters; the italic, bold and bold italic variants currently don't (and
there is little point having, say, slanted box-drawing characters :) So I
believe these fonts should have the "Symbol Character Set" bit set. My
concern is that Microsoft have set numerous other bits as well (mostly
referring to the MS-DOS code pages) which are not set in the Free fonts,
and this might be the culprit.

It bothers me, though, why IE should rely on the old MS-DOS code pages.

With kind regards,
Primoz

- --
Primož Peterlin,   Inštitut za biofiziko, Med. fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani
Lipičeva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija.  address@hidden
Tel +386-1-5437632, fax +386-1-4315127,  http://biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si/~peterlin/
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