[tlhIngan Hol] Out of curiosity..

[Daniel Dadap]

> On Feb 22, 2019, at 09:42, Will Martin <willmartin2 at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> I think the font I now use on my Mac is my modified version, but I never managed to get it into iOS, and I’m not even sure if I still have it on the Mac...

For iOS if you want a font to be available to all apps you need to install it via a configuration profile. Unfortunately even this doesn’t help /that/ much, since most apps won’t let you select a font.

> And I didn’t pay for an upgrade when Fontographer failed to survive an OS upgrade. And it never worked in Email, where I would have most wanted to use it...

That’s why newer pIqaD fonts use the Conscript registry mapping of the BMP’s Private Use Area. Unfortunately, since pIqaD isn’t part of the official Unicode standard that means anybody else can define their own characters in that same space. This is especially problematic on macOS/iOS as Apple chose to use the same codepoint to represent the Apple logo as the Conscript registry assigned to the Klingon empire symbol. (Well, the mapping calls it a “mummification glyph” which is not necessarily the same thing, but every font I’ve seen puts the trefoil in that spot.)

You still have to have a suitable font installed on the receiving end, but at least some font renderers will automatically select a font that defines the appropriate characters (e.g. a pIqaD font, if you have one installed) if the font it would have otherwise used doesn’t define them. In practice it works somewhat reasonably well.