Unicode on Palm
Many of you may have seen the post a few weeks ago about Hebrew and Aramaic developments on the Pocket PC. I am happy to let you know that we have been working on these features on Palm as well Unfortunately, the Palm OS is still in the dark ages when it comes to font support. To make Hebrew look the best we needed to support Unicode and take advantage of technologies that have been developed for rendering complex scripts. Since Palm does not support this we had to create our own Unicode solution for Palm.
You may be wondering just what is Unicode and why is it important. Unicode is a character encoding that is used to represent characters in most of the world’s scripts. So by supporting Unicode on Palm we now have a way to render text from most languages! See the screen shot below for an example (we have not applied any cursive joining rules on this screen shot).
The first book we are working on with Unicode support is the HMT. Here is a screen shot of the beta version of HMT with Unicode support. The display and rendering of the Hebrew is much improved with this new Unicode HMT.