RE: A basic question on encoding Latin characters

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Sat Sep 25 1999 - 06:51:55 EDT


Ar 11:31 -0700 1999-09-24, scríobh John Hudson:

>Other problems stem from over
>enthusiastic application of the abstract character philosophy by the UTC,
>resulting in awkward codepoint unifications which make the task of mapping
>glyphs to character encodings in fonts unnecessarily complicated.

We successfully disunified YOGH from EZH and S and T WITH COMMA BELOW from
S and T WITH CEDILLA.

>This
>accounts for, among many other instances, the lowercase hooked f used in
>the orthographies of many African languages being unified with the
>florin/guilder currency symbol, which is semantically distinct, most often
>fitted to the figure width, and almost always stylistically represented in
>an oblique or script form.

And therefore most fonts are useless for the African languages. To my mind
the florin sign does not appear in the UCS.

>The job of the font developer might be described as 'solving glyph problems
>caused by character sets'.

No, we should fix the character sets.

The following disunifications are, in general, still under discussion:

* COPTIC to be disunified from GREEK
* CYRILLIC LETTERs KU, WE, to be disunified from LATIN LETTERs Q, W
* FLORIN SIGN to be disunified from LATIN LETTER F WITH HOOK
* LATIN LETTER TONE THREE to be disunified from CYRILLIC LETTER ZE
* LATIN LETTER TONE FOUR to be disunified from CYRILLIC LETTER CHE
* CYRILLIC LETTER EN WITH TAIL to be disunified from CYRILLIC LETTER EN
WITH DESCENDER
* IPA Greek letters to be disunified from Greek letters.

Of them, I suppose the FLORIN SIGN disunification might be considered
expensive to industry because Ÿ appears in Apple and Microsoft code pages.
Pity about the Africans, in that case. Unless we help them by adding a
LATIN SMALL LETTER AFRICAN F WITH HOOK which would case map to the LATIN
CAPITAL LETTER F WITH HOOK.

--
Michael Everson * Everson Gunn Teoranta * http://www.indigo.ie/egt
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland
Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn;  Baile an Bhóthair;  Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:53 EDT