RE: Introducing the idea of a "ROMAN VARIANT SELECTOR" (was: Re: Proposing Fraktur)

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Wed Jan 30 2002 - 05:09:13 EST


Karl Pentzlin wrote:
> [...] (as you can encode a Serbocroatian plain text to
> be displayed in Latin or Cyrillic correctly without change).

I guess you are talking about old Yugoslav character sets, as this would not
be possible in Unicode.

Another case of a single encoding which overlaps more than one script is
ISCII, the Indian standard encoding.

> Fraktur and Roman are "script variants", not "font variants". Both
> "script variants" have a lot of fonts, but they are not fonts
> themselves.

In rich text, you don't necessarily have to set a different font for roman
words in Fraktur text: the higher level protocol could be designed to have a
"roman" or "loanword" tag which is independent of font choice.

In plain text, I think that plane 14 language tags could be used: imagine
defining a language "old Swedish" and a sub language "old Swedish/LOANWORD".
But I know that these language tags are not very popular, and perhaps I am
stretching their usage scope too much...

_ Marco



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