Re: relation between unicode and font

From: Yung-Fong Tang (ftang@netscape.com)
Date: Mon Jan 08 2001 - 15:40:46 EST


Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:

> With that said, this type of "bug" is actually by design for many languages
> that have speakers who are not using Unicode. When you look (for example) at
> Indic languages on the web, the vast majority of them are handled by this
> type font hack.

I know. But when the specification of TrueType clearly specify what the
character code is in the range of 0x00-0x7F with a particular flag and
the font designer still insiste to put a glyph of a different character
there, it is a violation of the specification. I understand the need to
do so. If it is not a font BUG, then we should call it a hacky font at
least.

>
> So I am hesitant to call it a BUG. Its just the encoding that people will
> use.

Not really. It is ok if people use such encoding. However, the problem
is the font designer tag the font as CP1252 encoding. In other words,
it is like I speak Chinese to you and insist that my Chinese sentance is
in English. While I am free to speak Chinese to you, it is not free for
me to call my Chinese as English.

>
> It would be nice to move them to Unicode, sure. But with (again, for
> example) most of the folks at tamil.net using Windows and then with less
> than 5% of them using Windows 2000, they certainly cannot see Unicode as
> their best option at this point.

Totally understandable.

>
> Looking forward they know its where they want to be, but for now they are
> fairly embedded in TSCII (or TAB) at best, random font hacks at worst.
>
> MichKa
>
> Michael Kaplan
> Trigeminal Software, Inc.
> http://www.trigeminal.com/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Yung-Fong Tang" <ftang@netscape.com>
> To: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
> Cc: "Unicode List" <unicode@unicode.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 05, 2001 11:29 AM
> Subject: Re: relation between unicode and font
>
>
>
>> Not really a browser bug. It is a bug in the FONT. Some of the font
>> basically claim they are design for a certain encoding which 0x00-0x7F
>> represent ASCII while the glyph in that font in those position have
>> shape in non ASCII. If font author *lie* to browser, in the information
>> which encoded in the font, there are no thing the browser (or browser
>> developer) can do.
>>
>> Jukka.Korpela@hut.fi wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, sreekant wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> <font face="Tikkana">A B </font> is being shown as some telugu
>>>> characters.
>>>
>>> That's basically a browser bug, though some people have seen it
>>> as a method of extending character repertoire. It has absolutely
>>> nothing to do with Unicode. For an explanation of the fallacy, see
>>> http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7eflavell/charset/fontface-harmful.html
>>> http://babel.alis.com/web_ml/html/fontface.html
>>>
>>



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