Font problems (was: Re: [Buddha-l] Women's Role in the Sangha)

[Christopher Fynn]

Margaret Gouin wrote:

> On Wed, August 1, 2007 2:51 am, Piya Tan wrote:
>> The very first paper by the Congress of Western Buddhist Nuns, entitled
>> Research regarding the Lineage of Bhiksuni Ordination
> <http://www.congress-on-buddhist-women.org/fileadmin/files/Establishing%20Full%20Ordination%207_dia.pdf>
>> located at:
>> http://www.congress-on-buddhist-women.org/index.php?id=29
>> seems to be filled mostly with dots and dashes, although it is PDF.


> It comes up fine for me. Which probably means I have the font they used on
> my computer and you don't. This seems to me to be a major problem with PDF
> files--people assume that just making a PDF will include all the necessary
> fonts--it doesn't. You have to embed the necessary fonts so that other
> people can read them. I can try to figure out which font it is and let you
> know.


I had the same problem with Acrobat 8 Reader though it opens OK with Acrobat 7.

The font is TimesCS Roman - The font *is* embedded, but there seems to be some 
small fault in the Regular / Normal version of the font which causes Acrobat 8 
to have a problem extracting or displaying it properly. The italic and bold 
faces seem to work fine in both Acrobat 7 & 8.


BTW
I don't know why anyone is still using fonts with the non-standard & outdated
CS & CSX encodings in order to display diacritic characters.
Windows (2000, XP and later), Mac OS-X, Linux and Unix all support Unicode
- which has all the diacritics characters needed by Indologists and others.
John Smith who created the CSX fonts has stoped distributing them and now
has free Unicode fonts available:
<http://bombay.indology.info/software/fonts/index.html>
<http://bombay.indology.info/software/fonts/induni/index.html>
On that site John also has some Word macros available to convert old documents 
from CSX encoding to Unicode - as well as some free Devanagari fonts.

A couple of other free Unicode fonts with diacritic characters are
Gentium (a very high quality font by Victor Gaultney)
<http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium_download>
and Linux Libertine
<http://linuxlibertine.sourceforge.net/>

The "Georgia" font which comes with MS Windows also seems to have all the 
necessary diacritic characters for transliterating Sanskrit & Pali.

Using Unicode / iso10646 encoding in your documents with properly encoded fonts 
should mean that they may be searched using Google, Yahoo and so on if you make 
the documents available on the Web.

- Chris