by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/05/31 03:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/05/31/8565229.aspx
If you watched Saturday Night Live way back when, you might have remembered the Mike Myers skit involving Simon, the one who was always calling the viewer a "cheeky monkey".
I was thinking about this the other day when Paul asked over in the Microsoft VOLT user's community:
I added the Ol Chiki glyphs to a font (U+1C50..U+1C7F) as well as others newly assigned code points in the Unicode 5.1 standard.
The glyphs are definitely present in the TTF file (I checked with TTX and Microsoft's Font Validator), but they don't show up in the Windows XP "charmap" application (Start / Run / charmap, then choose a font).
Does something have to be added to a TTF file in Volt or some other tool to have Windows consider newly defined code points to be valid?
I looked around, and there are a few fonts out there like Code2000 that support Old Chiki.
Here are the characters, you can see if your browser supports them (assuming you have the font installed, I mean):
᱐᱑᱒᱓᱔᱕᱖᱗᱘᱙ᱚᱛᱜᱝᱞᱟᱠᱡᱢᱣᱤᱥᱦᱧᱨᱩᱪᱫᱬᱭᱮᱯᱰᱱᱲᱳᱴᱵᱶᱷᱸᱹᱺᱻᱼᱽ᱾᱿
But as Paul mentioned, the XP Character Map program does not show them:
In the advanced view, you try to Go to Unicode 1C50, and nothing is there (the lowest one closest to the requested character is U+1e00).
Now the good news is that the same font in Vista will show the characters in the script:
Note that the name is not there -- it lists the character as "Undefined" -- the string that getuname.dll (which has been mentioned previously) returns when it does not know about a character. The only fix for that would be some future version of Windows after Unicode 5.1.
I asked some people if they knew what might have changed, people did not seem to recall a targeted change that was aimed at this problem (and none of the bugs resolved really jumped out for me as the fixer), so it may have just been one of those "fixed by accident" kind of bugs.
So Paul, the good news is that there is nothing you need to do. Of course the bad news is that there is nothing you can do. :-(
There are some other interesting issues here, like one I found in RichEdit, that I'll talk about soon....
This blog brought to you by Ḁ (U+1e00, aka LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING BELOW)
DR GC KISKU on 29 Mar 2011 1:35 AM:
Excellent effort, Carry on. Congrats.