Re: Font Technology Standards

From: Frank Yung-Fong Tang (ytang0648@aol.com)
Date: Wed Mar 03 2004 - 12:07:19 EST

  • Next message: C J Fynn: "Re: Font Technology Standards"

    C J Fynn wrote on 3/3/2004, 11:41 AM:

    > Frank Yung-Fong Tang wrote:
    >
    > > And I am sure the following DOES NOT exist although I hope there
    > > we can have one day- Glyph Encoding Standard. Map a glyph to
    > > a fixed glyph ID. (The Arabic presentation block A and B sort of
    > > like this one) For example, it will be much easier for people to
    > > understand the Indic font if there a INFOS glyph mapping standard
    > > for all their indic fonts.
    >
    > The font formats that Bob mentioned
    > OpenType from Microsoft & Adobe
    > GX and AAT from Apple
    > SIL Graphite from SIL
    >
    > are desined to *get away* from this kind of thing
    >
    > A Glyph Encoding Standard like Frank suggests is just encoding glyphs
    > as characters once removed or by the back door. It ony makes any sense
    > for scripts that never have complex or contextual shaping requirements.
    >
    > Certainly not Arabic or Indic scripts.
    >
    > - Chris

    Surely I understand these technology are there to "get away" those kind
    of thing. The thing I do not understand is why can't those thing EVER
    been standalized. I can understand that we may not be able to
    standardlized it as today, due to lack of fully understand all the
    possible combination and different typographic design choose. However,
    there are no reason it is not a unreachable goal. And even today, it is
    possible to standardalized some of the glaph encoding, without
    standardlized the character to glyph mapping.

    For example, we can standarlized a set of Arabic glyphs with their
    encoding. Ok... someone will say, what will happen if we need to add
    additional Arabic "like" glyph for minority Arabic dialect? Will, add
    extension to it. Since the glyph encoding standard itself do not decide
    how to map from characters to glyph, you can change that part to use
    additional ligural glyph or newly added characters, etc.

    Also, for those "simple script" the glyph encoding SHOULD be
    standarlized as today.

    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 03 2004 - 12:59:37 EST