Ar 19:09 -0800 1997-11-26, scríobh =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Emil_HER=A9AK?=:
>1) The attached gif shows the two forms of UK used in Old Slavonic Cyrillic.
>The first form has received encoding, but the second has not. Naturally, I
>understand that differencing in letter form can be resolved by fancy fonts
>etc.
The form is the glyph. If you would recognize both forms as a
representation of the same thing (i.e. it means no difference which is used
in a given word) then in principle they are supposed to be unified as
characters and some process is to tell the computer whether it is to be
rendered as "oy" or as "8".
No one really provides a mechanism for this. For Arabic, it is built into
the rendering engine at a high level. For simple alphabetic scripts like
Cyrillic, I don't know how it would be done. There are claims about "smart
fonts", but I never saw one. In some Tibetan software I have used you can
type a "variant" key to change its preceding character's shape (which is
not much different from having two characters in some instances since it's
not contextual. I have a lovely OCS book from 1861 here in front of me. I
seem to find "oy" used in word-initial position and "8" in other positions.
If that were a rule, then a smart font would be able to render correctly.
But experts like yourself must tell us.
Of course, QuickDraw GX was supposed to provide this kind of rendering, but
no one really implemented it and I hear it is being withdrawn. In favour of
what I don't know.
>but in this case the second form appears regularly in some later texts and
>not in others. Since or at least many of the other letters remain more or
>less
>standarised, it would make little sense to produce two separate type-faces
>with differing "uk" characters. It would seem to me best to provide one more
>slot in Old Cyrillic to cover this alternative form.
I would not fight strongly for a unification (which should come as no
surprise to readers of Unicode list). What do existing typefaces provide?
Are there any coded character sets with both?
>2) Glagolitic. I would like to know if any work has been done so far on this
>historical script.
I am working on it with Hinko Muren in Ljubljana. Apparently John Clews is
working on it also.
-- Michael Everson, EGT * http://www.indigo.ie/egt 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire (Ireland) Gutháin: +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
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