Re: Questions on ZWNBS - for line initial holam plus alef

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 15:15:18 EDT

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    John Hudson scripsit:

    > Again, you are working on the assumption that U+0020 is represented by an
    > actual painted glyph and not e.g. by a horizontal offset. In my experience,
    > the more sophisticated the application -- e.g. a professional page layout
    > application rather than a word processor -- the more likely it is that
    > white space characters will not be consistently treated as painted glyphs.

    I'm working on the assumption that applications that claim to conform to
    Unicode actually do conform to it. If they don't, and it's not the font
    foundry's fault, then complain, complain, complain! It's not Unicode
    that's broken, it's the implementation.

    > I've heard convincing arguments from the engineeers of such applications
    > that the space character shouldn't be a glyph in the font at all, but
    > should simply be a numeric value telling applications how large an offset
    > to apply. Since most fonts do not contain glyphs for variant white space
    > characters such as thin and hair spaces, applications typically treat these
    > as offset values. Painting a glyph is only one way to represent a character.

    Nothing in the Unicode Standard says those oddball spaces have to work
    "correctly" with combining diacritics.

    -- 
    A mosquito cried out in his pain,               John Cowan
    "A chemist has poisoned my brain!"              http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
            The cause of his sorrow                 http://www.reutershealth.com
            Was para-dichloro-                      jcowan@reutershealth.com
    Diphenyltrichloroethane.                                (aka DDT)
    


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