Re: glyph selection for Unicode in browsers

From: tiro@tiro.com
Date: Sat Sep 28 2002 - 05:47:49 EDT

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    Quoting Peter_Constable@sil.org:

    > Actually, my point was specifically that *part* of the infrastructure is
    > already present, at least in OpenType, but not *all*, either in OpenType
    > (meaning of "language" in the OT spec needs to be clarified, and
    > relationships between these tags and the "language" tags used for data e.g.
    > RFC 3066, need to be resolved)...

    'Language system' (not 'language') in the OpenType specification actually means
    *writing* system, i.e. a particular set of orthographic/typographic conventions
    associated with the use of a particular script. 'Language system' is a
    misnomer -- an historical artifact of the incomplete understanding of the
    format's original designers --, and it has caused all sorts of confusion,
    especially among people who assume that the OT 'language system' tags must have
    some relationship to things like NLS tags. There is no necessary relationship
    and, indeed, it is possible to conceive of a user wanting to apply, for
    instance, the typographic conventions of German to a language other than German.

    I've suggested to Microsoft and Adobe that the term used in the spec should be
    changed, or at least annotated.

    John Hudson



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