Re: Normalisation and font technology

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 12:55:23 EDT


At 05:39 5/29/2002, John H. Jenkins wrote:

>Well, and it's not the way we'd like things to be either. We hope to
>address this in a future release of the OS.
>
>To keep things in perspective, however, bear in mind that it's now
>possible to have file names which are up to 255 UTF-16 units long
>(including astral characters), and that AAT data in the fonts is respected
>by the Finder, even for PUA characters. I can name a file in Pollard if I
>like, so long as an appropriate font is present.

Yes, all this is very good news, and kudos to Apple for getting this in
place. I don't intend to pick on Apple for having a possible hiccup in
their file naming. I'm trying to raise the more general issue of how
decomposed text should be rendered, because I'm not sure that the
implications for fonts, layout engines, etc. have been carefully
considered, and certainly not well documented. In particular, I think it is
is mistake to resolve display of character-level decompositions by relying
on the presence of glyph-space substitution or positioning features in
fonts, simply because most users have very few fonts that are capable of
doing this.

Regards, John

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

When the pages of books fall in fiery scraps
Onto smashed leaves and twisted metal,
The tree of good and evil is stripped bare.
                                        - Czeslaw Milosz



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed May 29 2002 - 11:22:50 EDT