UTC/1999-026 October 18, 1999 Subject: AFII font for UCS:2000 Was AFII discussed at the last meeting? I don't see a reference to it in the minutes or agenda. What does it mean for Unicode to take over AFII responsiblities? What are these responsibilities? What does it mean for utilization of Unicode resources? Did AFII have an agenda that now needs to be added to the UTC agenda items? Unicode had a pretty clear focus on plain-text issues, not necessarily to the exclusion of other areas, but now that fonts are a concern does this change the complexion of Unicode Consortium or charter? My asking questions is not an objection of any kind. I just want to understand what this all means and maybe a little about how it came about. tex -------- Original Message -------- From: Michel Suignard Subject: RE: AFII font for UCS:2000 To: "'iso10646@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu'" ,unicode@unicode.org AFII responsabilities have been taken over by the Unicode Consortium. The same process is used to produce the ISO 10646 character charts and the Unicode book character charts. There are some variations for the CJK part. Finally there is no such a thing as 'a font' for the whole repertoire. Fonts used to create a chart are typically not very good for anything else (like creating readable text). They also requires text for non printable character (like the Space character and many format characters) and special rendering for combining characters. Furthermore, bounding box issues, baseline alignment and character sizing, make virtually impossible to make a good global font for anything (either chart or mere text creation). These issues were discussed in great length at the last IUC during the font panel discussion. The process in use for the chart drawing involved many fonts (over 50) especially tuned for optimal rendering in a chart environment. It is not impossible to create a single font, but it needs to be scalable as characters are referenced in different sizes in the Unicode book and the size of such a monster is not manageable by tools available to the many volunteers that gave a lot of their time for that effort. It is much easier to use a collection of fonts that are patched together by a charting tool. About who was behind AFII, it is now mostly irrelevant, many people involved in Unicode and SC2/WG2 also volunteered their time in AFII to help create the charts for ISO 10646 2nd edition. This includes Asmus Freytag, Mike Ksar and I among others. AFII was a non profit organization supported by membership. There is really no need to revive AFII, the Unicode Consortium has already taken over AFII responsabilities. Michel Suignard AFII former Treasurer, >-----Original Message----- >From: Markus Kuhn [mailto:Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk] >Sent: Thu, October 14, 1999 6:29 AM >To: unicode@unicode.org >Cc: iso10646@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu >Subject: AFII font for UCS:2000 > > >ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/N2047 says that AFII has prepared a font that >covers all non-CJK characters of UCS:2000, which will be used to print >the ISO standard. It also says that AFII does not exist any more. > >What will happen to this potentially very useful reference font? Is >there a chance that it could be donated to the public? > >It should not be too difficult to find people willing to continue >maintenance of this font if it is made available freely. Actually, I >myself, and I guess also some of my collaborators in the >XFree86 Unicode >font project, would probably be very happy to assist in maintaining it >as a public resource for printing character-set reference tables and >many other applications. > >Who were the members of AFII and who is in charge of the remaining AFII >resources now? > >Would it be possible and feasible to revive AFII as an open volunteer >project? > >Markus > >-- >Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK >Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: > >