Displaying International Characters

Question

Some users have been concerned about the fact that Buzzword
does not display some international characters - ranging from Greek
to Russian. This is accentuated by the fact that we have Buzzword
users in well over 100 countries.
The problem occurs when users attempt to insert some
international characters - say, the Greek letter omega - and
Buzzword instead displays a dot on the screen. Here's what's going
on, for anyone interested:
Like virtually all modern software, Buzzword adheres to the
Unicode standard, where characters are defined with 16 bits,
resulting in a total of over 65,000 possible characters.
However, unlike most desktop software, Buzzword must use
something called "embedded fonts". This means that we can't read
fonts off a user's computer, but instead we have to download fonts
from our server.
This is where our challenge begins. A font family contains
characters - called "glyphs" when drawn on the screen - for some
portion of the 65,000 possible characters defined by Unicode. Each
available character is downloaded as a small program containing
instructions on how to draw the glyph. The instructions are
relatively small, but each takes time to download - you can see
evidence of this in our "loading fonts" progress bar.
For Buzzword to load relatively quickly, we need to limit the
number of characters downloaded with each of our seven font
families. Most people use far fewer than 65,000 characters, so for
our first phase of deployment, we identified a couple hundred
characters to download for each font family. Because our initial
market focus was North America, we chose characters from Latin-1,
the Western European character set.
The result: when a user attempts to enter the Greek letter
omega, Buzzword recognizes the Unicode character but does not have
the downloaded instructions to display the glyph on the screen. The
little dot that is displayed instead is an indication that the
requested glyph has not been downloaded with the font set.. If the
user were to export the document to be read by a desktop program,
the glyph would probably be displayed using the computer's fonts.
Longer term, we'll handle this differently by downloading
fonts dynamically, based on the document's contents and a user's
settings. In the meantime, we apologize to everyone who uses
characters outside the Western European set. We will work to get
you a solution as soon as we possibly can.

Answer 1

quote:
Like virtually all modern software, Buzzword adheres to the
Unicode standard, where characters are defined with 16 bits,
resulting in a total of over 65,000 possible characters.
Actually, Unicode (the standard) does not care about the
number of bits.
It has enough space to encode more than one million
characters, and the current version (Unicode 5.1) already encodes
more than 100,000 characters (
http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/)
quote:
Buzzword must use something called "embedded fonts".
Nothing prevents Flash/Flex from using fonts "html style".
In fact, Buzzword can add a "Generic sans-serif" font as an
option (font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;) with
zero effort.
The document will not look the same on all computers, but
this might be better than the current bullets.
So this is not a "must".