Re: Fonts 10.4 to 10.5
- From: J.J. O'Shea <try.not.to@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 23:15:06 -0400
On Sat, 2 May 2009 22:16:51 -0400, AES wrote
(in article <siegman-31ACEC.19162102052009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):
In article <0001HW.C6224ACD0005932FB01AD9AF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@xxxxxx> wrote:
OS X 10.5 (Leopard) installs 102 font families, some families containing
multiple faces.
I've never quite understood why it is, or how it can be, that this many
fonts are needed? -- or perhaps I should phrase it, I've always wondered
whether the real needs of the vast majority of users (like maybe 99.5%
of us) could not be met with maybe 10 or 20 font families at most?
If so, and if most of these 102 increasingly arcane families really
represent holdovers from ancient history and ancient practices, keeping
track of fonts could be immensely simplified for the majority of us by
cutting the standard install to a dozen or two fonts, while letting
those font fanatics who insist on ever more obscure and unnecessary font
variations be allowed to complicate their systems to any level they
liked.
A very large chunk of those 102 font families cover non-Latin character sets.
Cyrillic. Japanese. Thai. Korean. Chinese. Hindi. Hebrew. Arabic. Others are
specialist dingbat character sets. And some are system support character
sets.
The default 18 are:
Apple Braille
Non-Latin character set, for the blind.
Apple Symbols
Non-Latin.
AppleGothic
System support.
Courier
Standard PostScript fixed-length serif Latin character set.
Geeza Pro
Non-Latin.
Geneva
System support.
Helvetica
Standard PostScript fixed-length serif Latin character set.
Helvetica Neue
Standard PostScript sans-serif Latin character set.
Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN
Non-Latin.
Hiragino Mincho ProN
Non-Latin.
LiHei Pro
Non-Latin.
Lucida Grande
System support.
Monaco
System support
STHeiti
Non-Latin.
Symbol
Standard PostScript Greek character set.
Thonburi
Non-Latin
Times
Standard PostScript serif Latin character set.
Zapf Dingbats
Standard PostScript dingbats character set.
You can have a look at the other 84 yourself. You'll find that many are
obvious non-Latin (anything with 'Hebrew' in its name, or with obvious
Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, or Korean names, for example...) or are
obvious dingbat character sets (anything with 'ding' in its name...) and
simply have to be present in order to allow the system to be used
internationally. Including on the Internet; many of those character sets are
automatically used when necessary if the user visits a web page which has,
for example, Hebrew or Chinese or Japanese embedded. If you visit
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiryu>, for example, the page displays the name
of HIJMS HIRYU in Japanese characters as well as in the Latin character set.
Which would not be possible if Apple hadn't included a full set of Japanese
characters into the standard fonts; there'd be funny little blocks there
instead. Those who don't use Japanese on a regular basis may get little use
out of the Japanese character sets installed as part of the standard setup,
but those who _do_ use Japanese will do so... and this is a selling point in
Japan. And Korea. And China. And India. And Thailand. And Russia and Serbia.
And anywhere where there are lots of Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, and
Thais. And anywhere where the Cyrillic alphabet is used.
--
email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.
.
- References:
- Fonts 10.4 to 10.5
- From: JF Mezei
- Re: Fonts 10.4 to 10.5
- From: AES
- Fonts 10.4 to 10.5
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