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Applications that provide an adequate level of support for SIL Unicode Roman fonts
(such as Doulos SIL and Charis SIL)

NRSI staff, 2009-02-16; 14997 reads

Users who do not require dynamically positioned diacritics, ligatures, or alternate glyphs can use almost any application with the font, but otherwise there are four basic categories of font usage:

Uniscribe

Uniscribe users should be aware that base+diacritic combinations that exist in Unicode (and the font) as precomposed chars are handled differently than those that are not (Uniscribe favors the use of the precomposed).  (Note however: PUA characters needing special handling, e.g., diacritics, will not work properly in Uniscribe-based apps. Nor do the double-wide diacritics).

• Office2003+ (Word and Publisher)
• Paratext 6+ ( http://paratext.ubs-translations.org)
•  OpenOffice 2+
• NotePad (will work only if you put the Uniscribe DLL version 1.468.4015.0 or later in a directory along with a copy of Notepad.exe and then use that Notepad.exe)
•  FieldWorks applications:  Translation Editor,  Language Explorer, and  Data Notebook
• In order for dynamic positioning of diacritics to render correctly in a Uniscribe application, Uniscribe version 1.468.4015.0 or later must be available for that application to use.

Non-Uniscribe OpenType

•  InDesign CS2 or greater — Available on Mac and Windows. InDesign CS3+ can handle dynamic diacritic placement. One thing Adobe products permit that Uniscribe-based apps do not is selection of alternate glyphs.
•  Mellel — Available on MacOS X. Supports ligatures and diacritic placement via OpenType.
• XeTeX — Available on MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Supports ligatures and diacritic placement via OpenType.

Graphite

Graphite handles the double-diacritics and PUA chars correctly.

•  FieldWorks applications: WorldPad 2.0+,  Translation Editor,  Language Explorer, and  Data Notebook — FieldWorks applications include a menu for changing font features.
• Graphite in OpenOffice.org — Release candidate 1. Font features are now available! Look at the samples document to see how to access them.
• XeTeX — Available on MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Supports font features, ligatures and diacritic placement via Graphite.
•  Thunderbird and Firefox (Mozilla)

AAT

AAT (Apple Advanced Typography) handles limited diacritic placement (not all arbitrary combinations will work well), and offers user-selectable features for choosing alternate glyph shapes.

• XeTeX — Supports some font features, ligatures and diacritic placement
•  Intaglio
•  Create
•  iWork (Keynote and Pages applications)
• TextEdit, and most software that uses the standard Mac OS X text frameworks, from utilities such as Stickies and  iChat to applications such as  OmniWeb, OmniOutliner,  MacJournal, and more.

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