Waldenfont Fraktur Fonts

From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 06:14:36 EDT

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    Dear Madam or Sir,

    on <http://www.waldenfont.com/products/gbp/gbp.asp>, you are offering
    a collection of beautiful German Fraktur, and Kurrent, fonts.

    However, I perceive a major obstacle for their application: You have
    based your fonts on a proprietary encoding; in particular, the Long S
    and the mandatory ligatures, are encoded in a non-standard way. This
    means that every existing text must be rewritten in order to be rendered
    with one of your fonts, and that your fonts cannot be used in an open
    environment, such as viewing WWW pages.

    Now, both up-to-date text-processors and WWW-browsers, exploit the
    Unicode encoding standard which comprises a wide range of characters,
    including the Long S (U+017F), the Round S (U+0073), some Latin-script
    ligatures (ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, and st, at U+FB00 through FB05), and
    a large private-use area which could be exploited for even more ligat-
    ures. E. g., MS-Word has been based on Unicode since version Word-97,
    Netscape Navigator has been able to display Unicode-encoded text since
    version 3.

    Now the question is, whether you would be willing to add a Unicode CMAP
    to your fonts, so they could be used to render Unicode-encoded text.

    The Unicode standard assigns to the rendering process the task of finding
    an adequate ligature; so a Unicode-enabled Fraktur font should have
    assigned suitable pairs of characters to the available ligatures. For a
    Fraktur font, this should work at least for the mandatory ch, ck, ff, fi,
    fl, ft, ll, sch, si, ss, st, sz, and tz ligatures (where "s" represents
    the Long S). (The above-mentioned ligature, and private-use, code-points
    are meant mainly for legacy data, or for very special linguistic needs,
    such as faithfully reproducing Gutenberg's printing with its large set
    of ligatures.)

    The Unicode standard, including code charts, can be found
    at <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/standard.html>.
    Distinguishing Round S from Long S is straightforwrd; ligatures
    are discussed in sections 2.1 (very briefly), 2.6 and 13.2, and
    the above-mentioned code points for Latin ligatures are discussed
    at the end of section 7.1. For German text, a ligature between the
    constituents of a composition would be prohibited by inserting one
    of the Unicode controls discussed in section 13.2, such as SHY (U+00AD)
    or ZWNJ (U+200C).

    Thank you in advance for your response.

    Best wishes,
      Otto Stolz



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