Windows 7 only support partial smart-display of Unicode characters?

On Sun, 29 Jul 2018 19:24:50 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote:

I set up a 'fire' webpage too, and tried it with several browsers:

on Win 7:

IE 11: proper shape but black instead of multicolor
IE 9: square
Firefox 61: OK

on Win 10:

IE 11: (same as on 7)
Firefox 61: OK
Edge: OK except with black border

on Win XP:

IE 5, 6, 8: square
IE 4: &x1F525;
Firefox 52: OK

on Win 2000:

Firefox 12: square with '01F' and '525' in it

on Mac:

Firefox 61: OK
Safari 11: OK

on Linux:

Firefox 61: OK
Chromium 67: black shape
Opera 54: black shape

Third party web browsers use their own font rendering engine, so their
result will always be diffrent than MSIE, Edge, and Windows.

On Sun, 29 Jul 2018 10:56:57 -0400, Mayayana wrote:

It's seeing it as a UTF-16 surrogate pair and
translating each word into UTF-8. Pretty impressive.
I wonder how it knows to do that. Since a newsreader
will be expecting ANSI or UTF-8, I would expect it
to render UTF-8 if it's valid or ANSI if it's not.

My Usenet client (40tude Dialog) supports Unicode, but apparently it's not
yet aware of 32-bit Unicode.

That makes me curious how you sent it. Did you send it
as an already reduced 16-bit surrogate pair, or was
it translated in transit to a 16-bit surrogate pair?

I copied the character from a software called "BabelMap" into clipboard,
then pasted it into the message composing window of my Usenet client.
Visually, it showed as one square character, but if I "walked" the cursor
through it, I counted two characters.

If I paste the character into Wordpad (after setting the font to "Segoe UI
Symbol"), it properly shows as a fire symbol. Walking the cursor through it
shows that it's indeed only one character. If I place the cursor after the
character then press ALT+X, the character is converted to "1F525". So, this
shows that BabelMap properly constructed and copied the Fire character into
the clipboard.

All of which makes me wonder what value this has
to you. The chance of anyone getting your text
accurately is very slim, so why use it? Even in HTML,
where this stuff is valid, you're playing with fire, so
to speak.

Can't be helped. I like my Usenet client despite being old and unmaintained.

Yes, there are other "better" Usenet clients, but despite being better,
newer, and more secure, the disadvantages for me of using the other Usenet
clients are greater then the advantages. In all aspects combined.

I tried putting 🔥 into a webpage. IE6
doesn't render it. Pale Moon 24, from 2014, doesn't
render it. Only Firefox 52 can render it. I wouldn't
even use such a thing in a webpage, much less in
a text file.

IMO, 32-bit Unicode is a relatively new standard. Many applications
don't support it yet. Some rarely used CJK characters are defined as 32-bit
code points, so while most applications support CJK, they may not be able to
properly render 32-bit code points.

In message , JJ
writes:
On Sun, 29 Jul 2018 10:56:57 -0400, Mayayana wrote:
[]
All of which makes me wonder what value this has
to you. The chance of anyone getting your text
accurately is very slim, so why use it? Even in HTML,
where this stuff is valid, you're playing with fire, so
to speak.

Can't be helped. I like my Usenet client despite being old and unmaintained.

Like you, I am old and unmaintained - as is my usenet client too.

Yes, there are other "better" Usenet clients, but despite being better,
newer, and more secure, the disadvantages for me of using the other Usenet
clients are greater then the advantages. In all aspects combined.

Likewise.
[]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

half the lies they tell about me aren't true. - Yogi Berra

On 07/29/2018 09:25 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Mark Lloyd" wrote

| I set up a 'fire' webpage too, and tried it with several browsers:
|
Wow. Very thorough test. So I guess the emojis
are packaged with browsers. Mozilla does have
EmojiOneMozilla.ttf in the program folder /fonts,
but I don't have a way to view the characters in it.

I have so many browsers (including old IE) around to test my website.
BTW, it works in MSIE 3 (although no Javascript).

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God,
for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because
they are spiritually discerned." Paul, 1 Corinthians 2:14

JJ wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 16:14:51 +1000, Monty wrote:
I can display the characters by using Everything search engine.

1. Start "Everything" and search for emoji

2. Click (or double click) on any .ttf file with "emoji" in the name

3. All the characters are displayed in the 4th and 5th lines from the
top of the display. A sample of the characters are also displayed
in various font sizes following the 4th and 5th lines.

Is that Everything's font file viewer? Or Windows'?

Cause it doesn't work in my Window 7.

https://i.imgur.com/HOcGJZ9.png

And not even Windows 10.

https://i.imgur.com/5XaFVP9.png

The Windows tool only seems to show the first page
of the font. The scroll bar isn't the right size for
any fun.

FontForge for the EmojiOne TTF font, you have
to scroll a long way to see "Fire", and even then,
you will be disappointed by the lack of color.
I don't think color was ever added to FontForge.
And the person who worked on that, put a *lot*
of work into it. It wasn't a 10 minute project.

I tried copying and pasting "Fire" into Wordpad,
and a surrogate pair was used. And Firefox
would display that in color.

https://s33.postimg.cc/49mt7rrvj/fire.gif

All this in Win10.

Paul

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 20:33:05 +0700, JJ wrote:

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 16:14:51 +1000, Monty wrote:

I can display the characters by using Everything search engine.

1. Start "Everything" and search for emoji

2. Click (or double click) on any .ttf file with "emoji" in the name

3. All the characters are displayed in the 4th and 5th lines from the
top of the display. A sample of the characters are also displayed
in various font sizes following the 4th and 5th lines.

Is that Everything's font file viewer? Or Windows'?

It is Windows Font Viewer. If you need further evidence you might
observe the icon in the top left just to the left of the font name in
the title bar. It is the capital letter 'A'. Now observe the same
icon on the task bar. Right click this icon and note the name at the
top of the box. Does it say 'Windows Font Viewer' ?

The picture that you posted on IMGUR is a picture of Windows Font
Viewer displaying the characters used in the font EmojiOne Mozilla.


Cause it doesn't work in my Window 7.

Can you please describe what doesn't work in your Windows 7 and in
Windows 10 ?

For example, I know it doesn't display some of the special characters
that I can see when I use Font Expert.


https://i.imgur.com/HOcGJZ9.png

And not even Windows 10.

https://i.imgur.com/5XaFVP9.png


Regards,

JJ wrote:

IMO, 32-bit Unicode is a relatively new standard.

The standard has existed for about 20 years. That is, for most of the
existence of Unicode.

Your copy of BabelMap will tell you that Unicode range F0000-FFFFF was
defined in July 1996, and Unicode ranges 10300-1034F, 1D000-1D1DD,
1D400-1D7FF, and 20000-2A6DF were defined in March 2001. One way to
check is to pick a character, use Tools / Character Properties, then
look under General Information at the box labelled 'Introduced in Version:'.


Many applications don't support it yet.

Windows 9x and Me only supported 16-bit Unicode screen output. Many
applications did not get updated until users moved off those old
versions of Windows.

Unfortunately, 40tude Dialog has not been updated since 2005. ☹�

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 08:21:44 -0000, RR wrote:

Unfortunately, 40tude Dialog has not been updated since 2005.

Amazing isn't it. And still going strong and doing the business.

"RR" wrote

| IMO, 32-bit Unicode is a relatively new standard.
|
| The standard has existed for about 20 years. That is, for most of the
| existence of Unicode.
|

That doesn't mean much if software isn't set up to
use the range. Even UTF-8 is only now getting wide
support, because it's become the standard for webpages
and for plain text in Linux.
Why wasn't it supported more widely earlier? Simply
because people don't need it. It's rare for anyone to
need to type both Russian and English, for instance,
in a single file. In an English-language webpage there's
little need for UTF-8. (Copyright signs for Linux
visitors who don't have codepages? That's pretty
much it, unless you happen to be a curly quotes
fetishist.)

And if keyboards can't type it, then what's the point?
You need not only software that can render the characters
but also software that provides a way to enter the
characters. And for that to happen you need relevance.

Emojis on webpages are essentially icons. HTML can
be used to express them if the browser supports them,
but they're not actually characters. Mozilla's emoji TTF
could just as well have been done as a GIF resource.

I have Paint Shop Pro 16 and the latest IrfanView.
Neither sees the emojis in Mozilla's TTF. Pale Moon 24,
relatively recent, also can't show the fire emoji. And
why should they? How often will such a thing be used by
anyone but teenagers chatting on phones?

Any website designer who uses the fire emoji will
have to assume that a notable percentage of visitors
are not seeing what they intend. You're probably safer
using Wing Dings. Mac and Linux people will see
alphanumeric characters, but they're only about 10%
of people online. There's no flame in Wing Dings, but "M"
is a nice cartoon bomb.

On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 12:23:53 -0400, Paul wrote:

JJ wrote:
On Mon, 30 Jul 2018 16:14:51 +1000, Monty wrote:
I can display the characters by using Everything search engine.

1. Start "Everything" and search for emoji

2. Click (or double click) on any .ttf file with "emoji" in the name

3. All the characters are displayed in the 4th and 5th lines from the
top of the display. A sample of the characters are also displayed
in various font sizes following the 4th and 5th lines.

Is that Everything's font file viewer? Or Windows'?

Cause it doesn't work in my Window 7.

https://i.imgur.com/HOcGJZ9.png

And not even Windows 10.

https://i.imgur.com/5XaFVP9.png

The Windows tool only seems to show the first page
of the font. The scroll bar isn't the right size for
any fun.

FontForge for the EmojiOne TTF font, you have
to scroll a long way to see "Fire", and even then,
you will be disappointed by the lack of color.
I don't think color was ever added to FontForge.
And the person who worked on that, put a *lot*
of work into it. It wasn't a 10 minute project.

I tried copying and pasting "Fire" into Wordpad,
and a surrogate pair was used. And Firefox
would display that in color.

https://s33.postimg.cc/49mt7rrvj/fire.gif

All this in Win10.

Paul

Firefox can indeed display the Fire character, and in full color. But that
doesn't conern Windows, since Firefox uses its own font rendering engine.
That's why it can even display it properly on Windows 7.

The main problem is when using Windows' font rendering engine.

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 14:49:57 +1000, Monty wrote:

Can you please describe what doesn't work in your Windows 7 and in
Windows 10 ?

You said that you can display the characters using Everything search engine.

I assumed that you meant the symbol charaters. e.g. that Fire character
which I've mentioned. Or is that not what you meant?

Keep in mind that the OP is about font rendering problem of specific Unicode
characters.

"JJ" wrote

| You said that you can display the characters using Everything search
engine.
|

I clarified that and he's clarified it:
Everything was a confusing sidetrack. It sounded like
he was using that to view fonts but he was just
describing how he found TTF files.

Everything does nothing, except list files on disk.
He's viewing the fonts in Windows Font Viewer.

Mayayana wrote:
"JJ" wrote

| You said that you can display the characters using Everything search
engine.
|

I clarified that and he's clarified it:
Everything was a confusing sidetrack. It sounded like
he was using that to view fonts but he was just
describing how he found TTF files.

Everything does nothing, except list files on disk.
He's viewing the fonts in Windows Font Viewer.

So then, maybe making a filename with the Fire surrogate
in it, would render in color in Everything.exe ? Hah!

The only way to spread the capability, is using the .svg
font, and how the hell can Windows use that ?

https://helpx.adobe.com/typekit/usin...lor-fonts.html

"Applications that support OpenType-SVG fonts

* Photoshop CC 2017
* Illustrator CC
* Firefox, versions 32 and above
* Microsoft Edge (in Windows 10 Anniversary Edition and above)
* In Windows 10, the DirectWrite and Direct2D platform components
allow OpenType-SVG support in any apps that use those APIs
"

A limited list...

Thunderbird might inherit the capability, simply
because 90% of the code in Thunderbird is a copy
of Firefox.

Paul

"Paul" wrote

| So then, maybe making a filename with the Fire surrogate
| in it, would render in color in Everything.exe ? Hah!
|

Interesting thought. I read somewhere that Windows
file names supports surrogates, yet the official standards
people recommend not assigning characters to them.
The whole idea seem odd to me. Unicode-16 has been
in Windows for ages, yet there's very little call for it.
If it were not for Asian languages we'd probably all
do just fine with codepages.

On Tue, 31 Jul 2018 19:25:35 -0400, Paul wrote:

So then, maybe making a filename with the Fire surrogate
in it, would render in color in Everything.exe ? Hah!

LOL.

I don't think Windows' own font rendering engine supports color fonts.
Otherwise, I'd see it in colors on the file name. Or is it that the Segoe UI
Symbol font's Fire character isn't in colors?

That made me curious, so I checked it using Wordpad...

Apparently, Windows 7 doesn't support color fonts. As expected.

https://i.imgur.com/ySBD3GL.png

Windows 8 got a little smarter for displaying the Fire character, but still
no color font support.

https://i.imgur.com/uj5b0Ll.png

Windows 10 seems trying to support color font, but looks like it fails. As
if they're playing Snake and Ladder.

https://i.imgur.com/11S3XsM.png

And interrestingly, Firefox cheated when displaying the Fire character. I
didn't expect to find that.

https://i.imgur.com/vvzSl0A.png