Re: dotless j

From: John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Date: Tue Jul 06 1999 - 10:17:18 EDT


G. Adam Stanislav wrote:

> So, what are Zapf Dingbats doing in Unicode? And what makes a filled
> circle a character entity?

Compatibility, compatibility. The barriers against adding glyphs
now are much higher.
 
> > Fonts should contain the glyphs required to print a script, not the
> > characters defined
> > to encode it.
>
> That's exactly what I am trying to get: I have yet to see a font (other
> than those I designed) that contains a dotless j. We need some kind
> of standard that would encourage font designers to include it in
> their fonts.

True. Alas, the font-standardizing organization has been in
org-limbo for lo these many years, and is being folded into
the Unicode Consortium (if I understand correctly).

> Perhaps we should split Unicode into two separate standards: One
> that would only contain characters (that means no Zapf Dingbats),
> and another one that would only contain glyphs (Uniglyph?).

No, but a glyph standard would be a Fine Thing. As of now, we
have a regrettably-obscure glyph registry, which is not very
accessible and costs $$$.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
   Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,
   Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.
			-- Coleridge / Politzer



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