Re: 2-bytes character display ready ?

[Nicola Pero]

> > I've just read http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html which ends up
> > explaining that X assumes a one-to-one correspondence between characters
> > and glyphs.
> > 
> > But that probably just means we need to do the conversion in the client,
> > which is perfectly fine :-)
> > 
> > So I wonder what happens if you send \UFB01 (which is the unicode for the
> > fi ligature) to an X font - does it actually display the ligature ?
> > 
> 
> If I do understand Nicola correctly we should just send a NSString from 
> the front end to the back end.

I'm absolutely not taking a position on how we should do things or how we
should interface front-end and back-end.  I need to learn a lot more about
glyphs and fonts before I can produce any good judgement of my own about
that.

I was just exploring the basics ... 

how do you produce the 'fi' ligature under X with a normal font ?
how would you produce it under Windows ? ... 
how would you produce it on a postscript printer ?
how would you produce it on common graphical libraries ?

the interface between front-end and back-end should be done in such a way
that the frontend can tell the back-end to produce the required glyph (the
'fi' ligature) in the same way on all platforms, and on each platform it
is relatively simple to implement backend code that produces the correct
glyph from the front-end call.