Re: Language Tagging And Unicode

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Jan 18 2000 - 20:05:10 EST


At 03:30 PM 18-01-00 -0800, Richard Gillam wrote:

>This whole discussion on Serbian and Russian Cyrillic is getting silly and
seems
>to be disappearing further and further down a rathole.

>I have yet to hear a good reason why the Serbian/Russian problem is anything
>more than a font-selection issue.

Exactly. There is absolutely no reason to make additions to a plain text
character standard to support localised glyph variants in a particular
style of lettering. Not only is it illogical it is also unnecessary. So,
please, let us drop discussion of this non-solution and, if we want to
continue talking about Serbian glyph variants -- which certainly are
important -- confine ourselves to actual solutions.

The current solution is simply to make Serbian font families, which have
the appropriate forms for these characters in the italic fonts.

I've suggested that an OpenType solution would allow for the presence of
these forms as glyph variants alongside their Russian counterparts, and
that these forms could be explicitly associated with Serbian through the OT
'locale' glyph substitution feature.

I don't think there is really much more to say, other than, perhaps, to
discuss ways in which these two solutions might be evangelised to ensure
the necessary support from font and application developers.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks
Vancouver, BC
www.tiro.com
tiro@tiro.com



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