![]() Mongolian Font Configuration Dialog in IE10 under Windows 7 In the case of Mongolian, no sample character is listed at all, which is even worse than the situation for Myanmar as no font ever passes the test for supporting Mongolian, and so although Microsoft has shipped a Mongolian font ("Microsoft Baiti") since Windows Vista, this font does not show up on the list of Mongolian fonts for IE10 and earlier. This means that no Myanmar font will show up on the list of Myanmar fonts unless it redundantly includes a mapping to the Tagalog character at U+1700. ![]() ![]() The reason for this mistake is that the list of Unicode 3.0 sample characters used by IE was based on draft code charts, and the Myanmar script was relocated from its original proposed location starting at U+1700 to a new location starting at U+1000 when it was actually encoded. Unfortunately, in the case of Myanmar (Burmese), the sample character used is U+1700 ᜀ TAGALOG LETTER A, which is a character from the historic Philippine script Tagalog (Baybayin) which was encoded in Unicode 3.2. It lists those fonts that: a) have the appropriate Unicode Subset Bitfield bit set and b) which also have a mapping to a sample Unicode character for the script. As discussed in Michael Kaplan's blog post, The importance of Tagalog to Burmese, aka "Of course I'd lie to you, I'm a font!" (18 April 2008), the main bugs in the feature are due to the way that IE populates the list of fonts for each language. When IE10 was released in August 2012, thirteen years after Unicode 3.0, it still only allowed font configuration for the original list of 37 languages.Īt the same time as no-one was updating the font configuration feature for the 62 new scripts that were added to Unicode between 3.1 and 6.1 (released in January 2012), no-one was fixing any bugs with the the font configuration feature. However, it seems that no-one took ownership of this feature, and it was left to languish for the next twelve years. This was a great start, and suggested that IE was going to provide cutting-edge support for Unicode scripts as they were encoded. When IE6 was released in August 2001 this list was pretty much up to date, and only lacked three scripts added in Unicode 3.1 (Deseret, Gothic and Old Italic), which had been released in March 2001, after IE6 had gone beta. (This is a little better than Firefox 25 which allows font configuration for 32 languages or regions.) Configurable Languages in IE10 under Windows 7 Language/ScriptĪparajita Arial Unicode MS Kokila Mangal UtsaahĪs you can see, this list does not include any languages with Unicode scripts introduced later than Unicode version 3.0, which was released in September 1999, but it does include all Unicode scripts available in Unicode 3.0 (Bopomofo is presumably subsumed within Chinese Traditional). IE6 through IE10 support font configuration for 37 languages or scripts. Tag Cloud for the BabelStone Blog as viewed with Firefox 25 Tag Cloud for the BabelStone Blog as viewed with Chrome 30 Tag Cloud for the BabelStone Blog as viewed with Internet Explorer 10 (I have had bad experiences with Firefox in the past, but reinstalled it for this blog post and was pleasantly surprised by its multiscript support, which is much better than I remember.) For multilingual users, especially those who work with more obscure scripts and languages, I find that Internet Explorer generally provides a much better experience, with fewer annoying little boxes for unsupported characters. The ability to manually configure what font to use for what Unicode script is a killer feature for me, and something that in my opinion should make Internet Explorer vastly superior to Chrome, which does not allow the user to choose what font to use by default for particular Unicode scripts (in the absense of a font being explicitly specified by the page being read). Thursday, 14 November 2013 Internet Explorer 11: Two Steps Forward and Two Steps Backįor years I have bemoaned the incomplete and broken implementation of script-specific font configuration in Internet Explorer.
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