From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 08:42:02 CDT
Dean Snyder wrote:
>Peter Constable wrote at 10:42 AM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004:
>
>
>
>>Let's say that you have adequately demonstrated that Fraktur text is not
>>legible to most Latin speakers. (This can be disputed since there is
>>some measure of legibility -- all of your subjects did recognize some
>>portions of the text. But I'll assume it's demonstrated.) All that this
>>demonstrates is that *glyphs* may not be recognizable. It does not
>>demonstrate that characters are distinct. For *any* script, one can
>>create glyphs that the average user of the script will find illegible.
>>I've seen Thai typefaces that I certainly had difficulty reading, but
>>that does not mean that the characters are not Thai. The point is that
>>*some* people can read such text, and they recognize those characters as
>>Thai, or Latin in the case of Fraktur.
>>
>>
>
>This, in fact, is an important reason why I chose to use a set of glyphs
>published as representative glyphs in the Unicode Standard; I did not go
>out fishing for some obscure font.
>
>
Glyphs shapes in the Unicode Standard are not considered normative
(though they may be for mathematical typesetting [?]) - and do not
necessarily represent their most readable form. Compare:
http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/fraktur.htm
Fraktur comes from a Latin word meaning broken / fractured - it is not
surprising that "broken" letters are difficult to read.
Fraktur and other Blackletter type faces were originally based on
elaborate calligraphy - and some elaborate calligraphic forms of many
scripts can be difficult to read - but this doesn't make them separate
scripts in the sense of that word used by iso10646 and Unicode.
- Chris
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