Re: The result of the Plane 14 tag characters review

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 16:56:43 EST

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    At 13:28 11/17/2002, jameskass@att.net wrote:

    >Recently on the OpenType list, a question was asked about handling
    >the differences between certain CJK punctuation within a single
    >font for correctly displaying horizontal Japanese and Chinese text
    >in the same file.
    >
    >John Hudson offered a solution for this issue.

    ...

    >Without a plain text method of distinguishing the writing system
    >for a run of text, a plain text file wouldn't be able to be
    >correctly displayed if it had both Japanese and Chinese text.
    >(Ideographic variants notwithstanding.)

    The solution I proposed involved using OpenType 'language system' tagging
    to access glyph variants using the Localised Forms <locl> OT Layout feature
    tag, which typically involves something more than plain text. Also please
    bear in mind that there is no necessary correlation between the misnamed OT
    'language system' tags (which are actually writing system or typographic
    system tags) and things like NLS or other 'language' tagging systems. There
    may well be desired OT writing system tags, e.g. for Wahabi Qur'anic
    conventions, that have no parallel in natural language tagging.

    This is not to say that OT language system tagging could not be linked to
    plain text language tags in many cases, only that the latter are in no way
    necessary and may not be sufficient.

    John Hudson

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

    It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
    the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
    to make them available to us, either by argument
    or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467



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