[oak perl] Review of "Fonts & Encodings"

[Eli the Bearded]

George wrote:
> there is a review of "Fonts & Encodings"
> on our site should you wish to read it.
> 
> corrections and comments would be appreciated.

Minor typo:
	Instead I focused on:

	    * Chapter 8: Font Management under X Window

s/Window/Windows/

Comments: in several places you mention chapters by number without
giving titles or rough descriptions of the contents. Yet no where
do you list the titles of each of the chapters for someone without
the book to know what those are.

I've made fonts before (mostly bitmap, but one TrueType), but I
haven't done it in years. The last font I made was in 1993 or so,
and I expect character encodings have changed things considerably.
These days converting fonts from one format to another would be
more likely to interest me.

I have some questions about the content.

Does it elucidate the difference between "character encoding" and
"character set"? I don't need to know that, but I think more people
do. (Within Unicode, a single character set, there are multiple
encodings like UTF-7 and UTF-8, as an example.)

Does it cover using fonts from, eg, Perl? I've recently had a need
to create Flash (.swf) files from Perl with multi-lingual content.
Since it is somewhat rare for any particular font to have all of
Unicode covered it would be useful to know how to query a font to
see if it has the needed characters. The Ming module offers the
less-than-ideal "coredump upon using a missing character" test.

Does it cover the differences between Unicode versions? I know
Unicode 3 is the latest, but how does it differ from Unicode 2?

Elijah