Re: Digraphs as Distinct Logical Units

From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 05 2002 - 14:04:14 EDT


Peter Constable wrote as follows.

>>On the matter of access to planes other than the BMP using older
>equipment,
>>that is a concern. However, I am looking at the possibility of a new
>format
>>for advanced font files which do not need operating system support and
>thus
>>can be used by graphics programs on a Windows 95 or a Windows 98 platform.
>
>Please, don't go into it here as this is not something that the font
>industry is about to even consider. There is little interest in investment
>to develop new technologies targeting Win 95.

I am not going to go into it in this forum at all. I only mentioned it at
all because you mentioned access to planes 15 and 16 in your posting.

My research is not something which I am asking 'the font industry' to
consider.

I am not seeking investment in this idea for a font technology.

My idea is not targetted at Windows 95 as such, it is for a platform
independent font format which could be used by, say, a TurboPascal
executable program on a Windows 95 platform, yet it is intended to be usable
on a variety of platforms.

>You're free to do whatever you won't. But don't expect many others to join
>you in this endeavour.

I am not expecting anyone to join me in this endeavour.

>>Hopefully the Unicode Consortium
>>will treat any advanced font format produced by anyone on an even-handed
>>basis with advanced font formats produced by any other person or entity or
>>collection of entities.
>
>Unicode is in the business of developing a character encoding standard.
>They need to coordinate their work with the font industry, but generally
>shouldn't be directing the font industry in how to do their job. At the
>same time, the Unicode Consortium needs to decide what they consider to be
>representative of "the font industry". A lone font maverick going in a
>completely different direction from the rest of the industry is not likely
>to be given too much consideration if his or her system presents different
>requirements on the Unicode Standard than the rest of the font industry.

That does not affect me at all as my eutofont format has as a key design
point that it presents no requirements whatsoever on the Unicode Standard,
it is being designed so that it simply makes use of published code points
and other published information.

>Thus far, your suggestion of a character-based font format (which already
>exists, BTW -- but not in *plain* text; it's XML -- see
>http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/fonts.html) hasn't mentioned anything that would
>present different requirements from the rest of the industry (and I hope no
>such requirements are forthcoming).

Thank you for the link.

I have no intention whatsoever of presenting any requirements whatsoever to
the Unicode Consortium. The eutofont format is intended simply as a way to
allow access to all planes, ZWJ lookups, chromatic fonts and other features
such being able to have 1456 object code subroutines within the font, while
being able to be used on a number of platforms, simply by making the font
not use any platform features. I have it in mind to have these as .euf
files, though that will just be a suffix for a text file, in a similar way
that some text files have .java as a suffix. If .euf is already in use as a
file suffix I will happily use a different suffix. Indeed I regard it as an
interesting challenge to try to produce such a font format without needing
to make any requests of the Unicode Consortium, in a disrupt-nothing vegan
style of approach.

I did recently learn about the way that PCs which are being replaced by big
companies are often being recycled around the world so it would seem to me
that there may be considerable scope for a eutofont font format which could
allow those computers access to the latest features of Unicode.

Thank you for your comments about digraphs.

William Overington

5 August 2002



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