MS Word says PUA is EA/CJK? TISNF!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/05/22 02:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/05/21/2782610.aspx

Parag asks:

Hi,

I am a font developer from India.

I have designed a multi-byte using private area of Unicode Range, and also a keyboard handler through which I want to use this multi-byte font in various applications.

My problem is, when I run my keyboard handler, set my font and try to type in MS Word, the font name automatically changes to MS Mincho and the characters are seen in Chinese.

Surprisingly, if I select the text and apply my font to it. I could see my language (Bengali) properly.

But why initially the font is getting changed to MS Mincho? Do I need to do somthing in intl.inf?

If the first character I type is space, font does not changes and I could properly type Bengali.

Please help...... I am frustrated.....

Regards,

Parag

It is hard to say without knowing exactly what parts of the Unicode Private Use Area are being used, but once I remind about the whole PUA? P.U. ! issue, I'll just add to the whole PUA/symbol issue by pointing out how apps like Word will assume that PUA in running text is actually being taken as if it was East Asian EUDC.

You might be able to get away with this not happening if you do language tagging so that Word does not think it is Chinese. Though don't try to make it Bengali or it will try to do all sorts of other things, or just not even be willing to let it get tagged that way.

Or maybe just give up on the PUA for this kind of thing when you use Word -- it really does seem like a "Unicode or bust" scenario....

There is some great information about developing Bengali OpenType fonts here, though. Highly recommended, rather than going down the PUA route. :-)

This post brought to you by ন (U+09a8, a.k.a. BENGALI LETTER NA)

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