Re: Custom fonts (was: Tolkien wanta-be)

From: Pim Blokland (pblokland@planet.nl)
Date: Tue Mar 18 2003 - 07:43:37 EST

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    Chris Jacobs schreef:

    > If I interpret a B font declaration on a webpage as a private
    agreement
    > that for data in that font on that webpage a PUA will be used were
    U+E000 is
    > a banana that does not imply that I claim anything about which PUA
    I use for
    > other purposes.

    You keep making it more and more difficult for the rest of us to
    follow you.
    To start with, your use of "PUA" is not what is generally meant by
    "PUA".
    There is no such thing as "a" PUA; there is only one Private Use
    Area, which consist of all the codepoints that will not be assigned
    a specific use by the Unicode Consortium. You cannot say that the
    range of codepoints U+E000..U+E0FF is a different PUA than
    U+E100..U+E1FF.

    Secondly, you must be aware there is not, and will not be, a rule
    about what characters in that area should look like. Yet you insist
    on trying to convince everybody it's a good idea to remap, for
    example "banana" to U+E100, even if the font calls it U+E000. You
    keep on about what a good idea it would be to be able to rearrange
    code points such that no matter how many fonts you have in use,
    there is always a banana at U+E100. This is a restriction, an
    unwelcome intrusion on the PUA!

    You also can't seem to decide if this is just something you want to
    do on your own computer, or if you also want to use this scheme for
    information interchange with other users.
    Now what you do in the privacy of your own home is none of our
    concern, but when communicating with the outside world, there are
    certain rules and guidelines you should abide by. And one of those
    guidelines is a plaintext file should not have PUA characters in
    them, unless its author also specifies it should be displayed using
    a certain font. Now if the font it should use is known, the proper
    codepoint to display this banana of yours is also known, because
    this info is in the font. Ergo, no need to remap!
    Since not all fonts have a banana, it really doesn't make much sense
    to not specify a font. The computer wouldn't know what to do!

    Lastly, I must say I think it's a pity that the suggestion I made
    yesterday has been ignored so quietly. You know, in a HTML
    environment, to retrieve names for characters from the font file
    itself, to relieve the author from the task of having to enter
    numerical values.
    For an example, suppose you have a font named "Tengwar Quenya", with
    a character named "hwesta" at U+E00B, you could use it in an XML
    file by defining an entity, <!ENTITY hwesta "&#xE00B;">. Now my
    suggestion was the browser program which displays this file should
    be able to look at the font information in the XML file, open the
    font file and retrieve the names of all characters in it, so it can
    show the "&hwesta;" character (and all other characters) without
    needing a long list of ENTITY entries in the XML.

    Anyone else think this would be a good idea?

    Pim Blokland



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