Re: Irish dotless I

From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Tue Mar 16 2004 - 14:06:31 EST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Irish dotless I"

    Peter Kirk scripsit:

    > It has the disadvantage of making these fonts useless for Turkish and
    > Azeri, and more fundamentally so than fonts which have <f,i> ligatures
    > with no visible dot. And of course the fonts would not be acceptable to
    > most users of English and other Latin script languages. So any such font
    > will be restricted to a small niche market.

    Inevitably so. It's a mistake to think that because Unicode unifies character
    sets, that it also requires or even prefers "unified" fonts. In anything
    but the most unusual circumstances, using Gaelic fonts for anything but Irish
    (and very marginally Scottish Gaelic and Old English) is a typographical
    travesty, akin to using Naskh-style Arabic fonts for Persian.

    Switching the representation of Irish text to use DOTLESS I, on the other
    hand, would mean that text being converted from Roman to Gaelic fonts would
    have to be actually changed. It would also create unnecessary work for
    representing mixed Irish and English text.

    -- 
    John Cowan   www.reutershealth.com   www.ccil.org/~cowan   jcowan@reutershealth.com
    Lope de Vega: "It wonders me I can speak at all.  Some caitiff rogue did
    rudely yerk me on the knob, wherefrom my wits still wander."
    An Englishman: "Ay, a filchman to the nab betimes 'll leave a man  
    crank for a spell." --Harry Turtledove, Ruled Britannia
    


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