David Perry’s Unicode survey

I have put on my website a draft of a document that surveys the current “state of the art” in font and application software. If you want to know which programs support Unicode well and which ones offer support for advanced font technologies such as OpenType and AAT, you will find it helpful. There is also a section that explains exactly what these technologies do, for those who need that info. I prepared this document because much of the information is not easy to come by, certainly not in one place. All platforms (Mac, Unix, and Windows) are covered. It is written with the needs of scholars in mind. This is a work in progress, so please send me any corrections or additional information. I am particularly interested in finding out if there is any good Unicode-based concordance/wordlist software out there.

The impetus for writing this file came from a discussion on the email list of the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative. This is a small but very energetic group of medievalists who have worked to define what special characters they need and are now in the process of preparing proposals for Unicode. We classicists probably should get our act together in the same way! Of course the TLG did a lot of work for us with their Greek proposals, but there are still things missing. Gabriel Bodard has recently raised the issue of the denarius (to which I would add the sestertius–might as well do all the monetary units at once!).

See http://scholarsfonts.net/textprc6.pdf