Re: dotless j

From: Torsten Mohrin (mohrin@sharmahd.com)
Date: Sun Jul 04 1999 - 15:15:57 EDT


On Sun, 4 Jul 1999 11:11:47 -0700 (PDT), G. Adam Stanislav wrote:

>How do you make a j lose its dot if you do not have a dotless j available?
>I don't get it. It would seem to make sense to me to bend the rules in this
>case and have a dotless j even if it is a glyph and not a character used
>by any language.
>
>If we really want to convince all programmers to use Unicode, we can hardly
>insist that they add low level code to every single program they write to
>remove the dot from the j by directly manipulating the fonts.

To remove the dot is the job of the operating system (or better: GUI)
with its display engine (font management, character rendering). This
engine has to select a 'dotless j' glyph from its glyph collection
("font") to combine it with a circumflex even if 'dotless j' does not
exist as a character in Unicode.

If the display engine of your operating system (or publishing system
or whatever) isn't capable of doing this, please contact the
manufacturer of the system ;-)

>Wouldn't it be considerably simpler to just add a dotless j to the Unicode
>standard so that font designers become motivated to include it in the
>fonts?

You would have to add a lot of presentation forms of the Indian
scripts (Devanagari, etc.). Unicode is a standard for encoding
characters not glyphs. There does exist legacy presentation forms that
have been included in Unicode for backward compatibility. I don't like
it very much, but nobody asked me ;-)

In the times of Unicode we need more sophisticated display engines.
The times of "mapping a character code to a bitmap" are over!

Torsten

--
Torsten Mohrin
Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany
Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450
http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT