GlyphGate 5.1 - Release Notes

Browser support

An important aspect of browser support is that of being able to show web fonts (fonts provide by a web server that would otherwise not be available on a user's machine). GlyphGate produces web fonts for 97% of the browsers that are being used by people on the internet today (according to The Counter.com).

Microsoft IE 1.x-4.x : Supported with images for headlines etc.

Microsoft IE 5.x : Web font support on Windows, Mac OS Classic and Mac OS X. Image support on Solaris. Probably no suport on Mac OS 8.0 and below. Windows users may optionally use an ActiveX control for enhanced features, such as text effects, hinting and smoothing.

Microsoft IE 6.x on Windows : Full support. No known issues. Windows users may optionally use an ActiveX control for enhanced features, such as text effects, hinting and smoothing.

Netscape Navigator 1.x-3.x : Supported with images for headlines etc.

Netscape Navigator 4.x : Web fonts are supported through the FontEnabler plugin on Windows and Mac OS Classic.

Mozilla 6.x-7.x : Web fonts are supported through the FontEnabler plugin on Windows, Mac OS Classic, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. This support is avilable for various variants of this browser, including Firebird, Firefox, Netscape, etc.

Safari 1.x : Web fonts are supported through the FontEnabler plugin on Mac OS X. GlyphGate font effects, such as shades and glow is not supported.

Opera : Supported with images for headlines etc.

Other browsers : The remaining browsers that are able to show images are supported through server created images for headlines and other significant texts on web pages. Text only browsers, such as Lynx and W3M, are also supported to the extent that GlyphGate handles character set encoding, CSS processing, language translation, transliteration and other significant features.

System requirements

The following web servers are supported: Apache 1.3, Apache 2.0, Apache 2.2, IIS 5.0, IIS 6.0 and iPlanet 5.0.

Minimum hardware requirements:

• 1.0 Ghz CPU (e.g. pentium, sparc or ppc)
• 256 MB Ram
• 20 MB free harddisk space

System requirements vary depending on web server work loads, as well as size, complexity and language content of hosted web pages. The memory requirement may be higher for web pages with large character sets, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean pages. Such page may refer to fonts that each may be 8-40MB. The CPU speed requirement may be higher for pages with language content that requires text to te re-ordered and shaped, such as Arabic and Indic languages.

GlyphGate does not work under the following configurations:

• IIS on Windows NT. IIS on Windows NT is a platform which lacks significant security, stability and features that has been introduced by Microsoft since Windows NT was released almost a decade ago. It is recommended to use GlyphGate with Apache 1.3, Apache 2.0, or iPlanet 5.0 on this platform.
• Microsoft Personal Web Services, Peer Web Service. The included edition of IIS on non-server Windows editions is limited to five concurrent connections which prevents this web server from function reliably. Apache 1.3, Apache 2.0, Apache 2.2 or iPlanet is recommended on this platform for these reasons.
• Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows Xp Home. These editions of Windows lacks signification network, language or security features that makes them inappropriate for running web servers.

GlyphGate extends web servers through extensions introduced by IIS (IISAPI), Apache (so modules), and iPlanet (NSAPI). Please contact us for further information on acquiring GlyphGate for a web server that is compatible with one of these technologies.

Language support

Some languages require characters to be shaped and positioned before being rendered, such as many Asian languages. Some browsers do not handle these languages correctly, in which case GlyphGate will pre-compose such text (e.g. change the shape, order and position of the characters in a text). This support is provided by GlyphGate Glyph Shaping and Positioning (a.k.a GSP) on all platforms, as well as by Microsoft Uniscribe (usp10.dll) on Windows. As new languages are being added to Unicode/ISO10646, these technologies are being extended rapidly to support more and more languages.

Current support includes:
Uniscribe: Arabic and Indic. Please see your Windows installation documentation.
GlyphGate GSP: Arabic based scripts (Saudi, Sindhi, Urdu, Pashto, etc), Extended Latin (Yukon, Polynesian, etc), and Brahmi descended scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Myanmar, Oriya, Tamil,and Telugu).

Note: Some of the Brahmi based scripts rely of the use of OpenType Layout fonts. As the OpenType Layout is not defined for some of these langauge yet, those langauge may not provide the same level of typographical featutures (use of ligatures etc) as other other Brahmi descended scripts. Also, Windows users may need to update their Uniscribe (USP10.DLL) to enable correct rendering of some Brahmi based scripts.

Language input is provided by GlyphGate through Simple Web IME language methods. Current list of supported langauges include Canadian Syllabic, Chinese Mandarin, Chinese Cangji, Chinese Cantonese, Greek, Korean Hanja, Japanese Kana, Japanese Kanji, Sino Japanese, Latin Diacriticals and Russian. Please see the on-line documentation for information about how to add support for additional languages. Please note also that the SWIME is not available for quite all browsers and all platforms. It is supported by at least the most recent version of Safari on Mac OS X, Internet Explorer on Windows and Mozilla on all platforms. Mac IE does not supported all languages, and Safari as performance problems for large keyboard definitions (e.g. when entering Kanji text).

Change history

• JIT compiler has been optimized for improved performance
• A character spacing problem with web fonts of multiple styles (such as bold and italic) has been corrected.
• Web connecttors for Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x has been improved. Apache 2.2.x is supported as well now.

• Various improvements to the HTML JIT for pages with extensive JavaScripts.

• Handing of Apache worker-MPM has been optimized.
• HTML JIT compilation of dynamic pages has been optimized.
• Fonts with long names (more than 32 characters) are supported now.

• The css property "x-smooth-control" has been extended to allow web pages to chose between Cleartype and Standard smooth rendering on Windows. The expected value is "[size] [type]" where "[size]" is a font size (e.g. 42pt or 42px) and "[type]" is the rendering type (e.g. 'ct' or 'std'). Cleartype is used by default on Windows. This setting is only supported when the FontEnabler plugin is used.
• The FontEnabler plugin has been updated for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0.3790 and above.

• Character spacing and handling of concensed black fonts has been improved.

• The writing direction of Arabic digits has been corrected now.

• A workaround for a charcter spacing problem with Internet Explorer on Windows (seen with standard smooth text setting) has been implemented now.

• The GlyphGate Update agent has been redone.

• The GlyphGate Administration server (GGAdmin) has been updated now. It no longer includes PHP.
• Additional performace improvements.

• Microsoft Internet Explrer users with the old GlyphGate FontEnabler plugin who do neither uninstall this plugin nor wants to upgrade to the new version are supported now.
• Additional performace improvements.

• Initial release. Please see the product site for a complete list of features.