From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Fri Oct 25 2002 - 04:42:10 EDT
Peter Constable wrote:
> >> then *any* font having a unicode cmap is a Unicode font.
> >
> >No, not if the glyps (for the "supported characters") are
> >inappropriate for the characters given.
>
> Kent is quite right here. There are a *lot* of fonts out
> there with Unicode
> cmaps that do not at all conform to the Unicode standard ---
> custom-encoded (some call them "hacked") fonts, usually abusing the
> characters that make up Windows cp1252.
IMHO, you are confusing two very different things here:
1) Assigning arbitrary glyphs to some Unicode characters. E.g., assigning
the "$" character to long S; the ASCII letters to Greek letters; the whole
Latin-1 range to Devanagari characters, etc.
2) Choosing strange or unorthodox glyph variants for some Unicode
characters.
The "hacked fonts" you mention are case (1); what is being discussed in this
thread is case (2). Like it or not, superscript e *is* the same diacritic
that later become "¨", so there is absolutely no violation of the Unicode
standard. Of course, this only applies German.
The fact that umlaut and dieresis have been unified in Unicode, makes such a
variant glyph only applicable to a font targeted to German. You could not
use that font to, e.g., typeset English or French, because the "¨" in
"coöperation" or "naïve" is a dieresis, not an umlaut sign.
There are other cases out there of Unicode fonts suitable for Chinese but
not Japanese, Italian but not Polish, Arabic but not Urdu, etc. Why should
a Unicode font suitable for German but not for English be any worse?
_ Marco
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