After reading It isn't really RED versus GREEN, Cheong asked:

I've searched for a while in charmap.exe and yet to find a font that'll display these characters in WinXP. That brings me to a question: Is there a font that ships with Windows (not necessarily WinXP or Vista... just any version. Maybe even a future version. :) ) that'll display most non-user-defined range of Unicode characters? Or at least that'll display most of the "sponsor characters" in your blog?

Sorry if this question has already been answered, because I've been yet to come up with effective keywords for this question.

For good measure, after a less than 24 hour wait he asked over in the Suggestion Box:

I'm refering to article titled "It isn't really RED versus GREEN"

I've searched for a while in charmap.exe and yet to find a font that'll display these sponsor characters in WinXP. That brings me to a question: Is there a font that ships with Windows (not necessarily WinXP or Vista... just any version. Maybe even a future version. :) ) that'll display most non-user-defined range of Unicode characters? Or at least that'll display most of the "sponsor characters" in your blog?

Sorry if this question has already been answered, because I've been yet to come up with effective keywords for this question.

Now I am not making fun of him, it was actually the Suggestion Box comment that reminded me about the question.

So what was done here was the right thing to do, at least insofar as right and wrong can be determined by whether a blog is inspired.

Don't look now, we are heading into an über-metablogong topic -- Blog morality! Where right and wrong is only defined in terms of the content of a Blog!

I'll revisit that topic again some day, since although it has the risk of playing out really dumb, I think I'll probably enjoy it. Though for now I'll go back to Cheong's actual question.... :-)

There is no font that ships with any version of Windows currently available that will handle any possible character that an ornery person like me sets up sponsorship details with.

On the whole, I have found that due to limitations like the one I described in The importance of Tagalog to Burmese, aka "Of course I'd lie to you, I'm a font!" that for many of the ranges outside the ones listed in the table in that blog, Firefox seems to do a better job finding fonts that will work than Internet Explorer does.Not so much that I'd yet claim such blogs on this Blog are "optimized for Firefox" because I still have an ECMA Script bug to track down. But maybe one day....

In he meantime, I find that for most of Plane 1 if you have a font that supports the character on your machine that Firefox seems to find it more often than IE does -- even IE8.

IE seems to be optimized for the fonts supporting languages that Windows claims support for, which one again suggests that a browser less interested in its idea to its OS has the opportunity to do better here. But that is just a theory.

My IE team advice would be to either take over MLang so you can update it, or dump it like a bad habit and find a way to support features that require forward looking thinking, like the aforementioned Tagalog/Burmese/Mongolian bug.

But to get back to Cheong's question.... :-)

I also do not know of future plans for such a font. Though with each version coverage gets better it is harder to imagine coverage of very obscure historic scripts with limited user communities a being a priority.

So I'd guess that, given the way I often to go to the more obscure parts of Unicode, you could not claim that Windows is optimized for this Blog, either.

Of course you have to realize that this argument is quite a specious tail-wagging-the-dog type argument, and not only because claiming that the reason one reads this blog is for the sponsoring character is like the person who claims to be reading Playboy for the articles (with the exception of Microsoft employees and I believe the July 1994 issue!).


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