Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jul 19 2003 - 14:24:48 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)"

    On Saturday, July 19, 2003 1:55 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:

    > Hm. See http://developer.apple.com/fonts/LastResortFont/ where it
    > shows glyphs for "illegal" characters (FFFE/FFFF etc.) as well as
    > "undefined" characters (valid code positions which have not been
    > assigned). I thought somehow that there was a glyph for "broken"
    > characters (characters that were just plain wrong) as well.

    Isn't this page creating the idea for a specific block of
    script-representative glyphs, that could be mapped in plane 14
    as special supplementary characters ?

    If the estimated number of Unicode blocks is expected to be
    under 1024, this block would use one special character to
    represent the glyph, i.e. not a control character, but a symbol
    representative of each assigned Unicode block. If such
    assignment is not easy to estimate now, glyphs for scripts
    should be assigned in the order of their definition in successive
    versions of Unicode).

    So fonts containing these glyphs could be designed to display
    these glyphs, in a way similar to the current assignment of control
    pictures. This page already gives the names of the characters
    according to the official names of scripts, but a more uniform
    name than the Postscript name could be used, such as:

    UNASSIGNED BLOCK SYMBOL,
    UNASSIGNED CHARACTER SYMBOL,
    ILLEGAL CHARACTER SYMBOL,
    then...
    BASIC LATIN SCRIPT SYMBOL,
    EXTENDED LATIN 1 SCRIPT SYMBOL,
    ...

    By itself, this Apple Developers page is nearly the base for such
    proposal. If needed, the Unicode "blocks.txt" could specify additional
    columns to specify the assignment of each script block, with
    special entries for the symbol used to represent unassigned
    characters in assigned blocks, or unassigned blocks.

    -- 
    Philippe.
    Spams non tolérés: tout message non sollicité sera
    rapporté ŕ vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Jul 19 2003 - 15:03:04 EDT