2 Quick Strikes Against Windows
You’d think my work laptop would have all the bells and whistles ready to go. After all, I run cygwin, the Linux emulator, as well as have full (legal!) installations of Office 2003 Professional and the latest updates from Microsoft. Apparently, my installation has issues, both of which are font related.
First, with cygwin. I tried to set up LaTeX, and hit wall after wall. Getting past using TeTeX instead, I still hit issues with installing Ghostscript, both the windows executable and the binary from cygwin. Something, deep within the belly of the machine is going haywire, but it pains me how easy it is to set up LaTeX and GS in Ubuntu: GS comes pre-installed in Hardy Heron, and after 10 minutes with the CLI I had a full PDF version of Professor Allen Downey’s How To Think Like A Computer Scientist, compiled from source. As of this writing, my windows/GS problems are still unresolved, so thanks, Windows.
The other issue is with unicode boxes in Firefox. Even in FF3.0, you can run into problems with boxes instead of text like this: さんぽ (if you’re seeing boxes here, you’re seeing the problem.) Apparently, Widnows doesn’t have full-on unicode support on by default, so you’ll have to get a full sans-serif Unicode font and install it. A simpler way might be to follow these instructions for Office installations, though YMMV. Don’t forget to restart FF if you go this route.
Even with years of experience, I still slap my head when it comes to understanding the pains and hassles Windows environments face. One of these days…..