Setting up tests for Tengwar as it would appear IF it were encoded
in Plane One IF the current slot in the roadmap were assured and IF
the current proposal were accepted unaltered has been a valuable
experience. (Yes, those are some mighty big IFs.)
Two characters won't display at all, either on Mac or PC. (Same glyphs
display fine as PUA.) (Still don't know why, it could be the font...)
We've also observed that BMP PUA support if the material is encoded as
UTF-8 is very poor in some browsers. (Well, I knew that one already.)
Doug Ewell mentioned the experience with Deseret, and how the
proposal changed before being implemented, and others have also
commented that there is no assurance that the current slot in the
roadmap would be the final location. This is true, for all any of us
knows scripts like Tengwar could end up in "Plane Five - The Astral Plane"
(or something like that) which is reserved for fictional, fantasy, and
extraterrestrial scripts.
On the subject of encoding Tengwar in the Standard... here's
my 2 ยข worth.
The creator of Tengwar is not adding to the script, from what I
understand, and a proposal to include the script has been around
for a while. The character repertoire is fairly well established and
if anyone finds any new ones, well, people are still coming up with
new character proposals for Latin and Cyrillic. Keep the combiners
consistent and simple, leave font and display technology out of any
language-specific loop. If someone needs a voder to read Tengwar
out loud based on a specific language, let them work out how to do
it, it simply needn't be a font or display issue. (Or a character
encoding one, for that matter.) Messing with combiners breaks
existing applications (like TrueType) and there is already a user
community using U+0000 to U+00FF custom fonts.
The timing of the movie release is unfortunate. Perhaps the Tengwar
and Cirth proposals will make it through all of the various committees
in time for the release of the movie remake.
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jan 08 2002 - 15:20:33 EST