On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Unicode Discussion wrote:
> > I don't believe, that the polish accent is different from the acute accent.
>
> I'm sorry you don't. But it is.
It is not relevant IMHO. Similar situations occur with ancient greek and
Vietnamese. In both languages, the acute accent is not centered in the
middle but moved to the left/right.
> > The acute of the ec fonts was designed by Boguslaw
> > Jackowski from Gdansk.
>
> Boguslaw Jackowski is a mathematician.
Oh, oh. Just curious: are you an expert in font design?
> The acute accent placed over the small "s" (which is usually, or at least
> often, more narrow than the vowel characters -- except "i") looks very
> distorting. As i mentioned, the Polish kreska is much more upright and
> placed more to the right than acute.
You are discussing glyph shapes, not character codes. It took a long time
for me to really understand the difference.
> There is not too much reference material about Polish typography, as the
> matter of fact there are only few serious designs of complete typefaces
> done in Poland (e.g. antykwa torunska, antykwa Poltawskiego), but they give
> sufficient information about how the Polish diacritic mark should look
> like.
If I understand you correctly you complain about the lack of good looking
Polish fonts!
> > BTW: I hope, that it will not become part of nationalistic pride to have
> > some unique characters for one's own language added to UNicode.
>
> Quick Quiz: Why aren't "es-zet" and "Greek beta" the same character. For
> me, as for a Pole, they look the same. ;)
There are far more serious examples: consider the Russian `A' and the
Latin `A'. The reason for not unifying them is that there are major
encoding standards which do not have them unified; and for major encoding
standards Unicode provides a one-to-one mapping for round-trip
compatibility.
> Ps. As the matter fo fact, the situationa about "ogonek" is also quite
> complicated and the "Latin-2/CE extensions" made in the Western Europe or
> in the USA are just UGLY.
Again, you are mixing up glyph shape and encoding point. Write letters to
major Polish software companies that the fonts they use are ugly.
Werner
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