Werner Lemberg <werner@www.nsysu.edu.tw> wrote on 1997-07-10 15:02 UTC:
> > 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.
Better yet: If you think you are a font expert, then just open a company
(this costs ~20 DEM in Germany) take a few good looking Western commercial
Type1 and TrueType fonts, and edit them to suit Polish style and typographic
tradition. Then you can
- either buy the modification licence rights for these fonts from the
manufacturer and sell them yourself in Poland and on the world font
market
- sell the Polish version of the fonts back to the manufacturer after
you convinced them that there is a market for this
- if you are really idealistic about this, just give the manufacturer
back your polished versions for free if they promise to put them
on their next CD-ROM
Just ask for instance Adobe whether you can licence their
Helvetica and create from it Helvetica-PL. Also ask Microsoft,
Bitstream, B&H, Linotype, etc. Also have a look at the many
available high quality public domain fonts that come with
TeX, X11, and ghostscript.
There are many national glyph style traditions. The German lowered dots
for the umlauts compared to the diaresis have already been mentioned.
In addition, as in the German language nouns are capitalized and therefore
capitals occur much more frequently, highest quality fonts designed
specifically for the German market use less wide capitals than for example
for the English market.
Just look for example at the CJK unification. These are essentially the
same characters, but in China, Japan, and Korea there is a significantly
different style in shaping these characters, so you always will want to
use language specific fonts for these ideographs.
All this is a font design and style issue, not a character set issue,
just as there are no different Unicode positions for upright and italic
letters A.
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:35 EDT