international fonts and character encodings

[Christopher Marshall]

I am having trouble understanding designations like 8859-6 and 10646-6.

I think they must refer to subsets of the full unicode character set.  Why are there two different
designations for the Arabic character set as a subset of unicode, then?

Also, 8859-6 and 1064606 are not "character encodings" is the same sense that utf8 and utf16 are. 
For the benefit of onlookers to this discussion, utf8 and utf16 refer to ways to encode unicode
character codes in a file.  In utf8, u0000 - u00ef (character codes 0 through 127, the ascii
characters we all know and love) are written to and read from the file as is, but bytes from
128-255, when found in a utf8 file, mark the beginning of an extended character sequence that can
be decoded into a two byte unicode character outside the range of 0-127 (or u0000 to u00ef).

Chris Marshall

--- James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj at acm.org> wrote:
> Basil Fowler wrote:
> > James,
> > 
> > One of the gotchas with truetype fonts is that a special program has to
> > be used to generate fonts.dir.  It is 'mkttfdir'.
> 
> Actually, the new version: >= 4.3.0 of XFree86 contains new:  "mkfontscale"
>   & "mkfontdir" that are *supposed* to handle TrueType fonts.  As I implied,
> there might be a problem with them that is the cause of this.  I also find
> that I do not have an encoding for "8859-6" and that might also be a problem.
> 
> > Once this is done, the resulting 'fonts.dir' has to be copied to
> > 'fonts.scale' in the same directory.
> 
> I always preferred to run have "mkttfdir" produce the: "fonts.scale" and 
> then run: "mkfontdir" to make the: "fonts.dir".
> 
> So, I removed "fonts.scale" & "fonts.dir" and opened the directory with the 
> KDE Font Installer (su mode) and it produced a: "fonts.dir" that does 
> include the "8859-6" entries.  Go figure. :-|
> 
> > The older Red Hat distros had an excellent init script kept in 
> > /etc/rc.d/init.d that automatically updated all font directories on
> > startup if needed.
> 
> It would be nice if KDE used the KDE Font Installer to do that when KDE 
> started up rather than the broken code in the: "startkde" script.  However, 
> for the system level fonts, it would have to be KDM that called it since it 
> would have to be run as root.
> > 
> > You produced a whole load of fonts encoded 10646-1.  My guess for Arabic
> > - and other languages using the Arabic alphabet - would be that the
> > encoding should be 10646-6. But perhaps others could check this out.
> 
> No, there is just one UniCode.  The "-1" is just there to conform to the 
> format of the XLFD lines.
> 
> --
> JRT
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