font problems in windows

Philip King (KINGPB@novell1.bham.ac.uk)
Fri, 30 May 1997 10:33:05 BST

I am working on the development of multilingual concordancing, and
building up sample parallel texts in various languages, including
Polish. I have come across a problem in using Windows 95 for Polish,
and wonder if anyone else has had the same experience or possibly
found an answer.

In scanning a Polish text onto a PC running under Windows 95, I found
that one character, the s-with-acute-accent (ANSI 156, in its
lower-case form), consistently failed to
show on screen, whether we were using the OCR package or a
wordprocessor. Transferring the textfile to a machine running under
Windows 3.11, the character showed up. I have checked this further
by printing off character maps of the same font as it appears in
Windows 95 and windows 3.11 (we copied the font
acroos onto the new machine from the old one), and it is clear that
most characters between 130 and 159 ANSI are being blocked in Windows
95. Many of these characters are punctuation, but some are s's, t's
and z's with various diacritics.

Further checking shows that Windows 95 appears to be blocking
generally non alphanumeric characters in the 128-159 range in other
fonts (Cyrillic, Greek, turkish) which are available under Windows
3.11.

Has anyone got any leads on this problem? I will post a summary of
replies.

Philip King