RE: Variation Selectors

From: Murray Sargent (murrays@exchange.microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Mar 29 2006 - 09:35:18 CST

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    For proper math support, a font needs not only the mathematical alphabetics and operators, but also many layout parameters and a myriad glyph variants. It's not easy to create a math font, but you'll see an amazing one soon (you already did if you saw my Unicode Conference talk this month :-)

    Murray

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Andrew West
    Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 5:43 AM
    To: Unicode Discussion
    Subject: Re: Variation Selectors

    On 28/03/06, David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
    > >
    > CJK ideograph variation selectors are more important. It has been
    > established to my satisfaction that no one agrees what is a semantic
    > significance in CJK ideographs, and that there are people who want to
    > distinguish ideographs that aren't distinguished in Unicode. A higher
    > level protocol is very clumsy on a letter by letter basis, and the
    > fact that Unicode doesn't support distinctions that are percieved as
    > necessary has been used to make political hay. Variation selectors
    > provide an easy way to support those people.
    >

    I remain unconvinced, and wait with interest to see exactly what ideographic variants will be registered. I do wonder how much demand there really will be for this mechanism given that font support will be a long time catching up with registered ideographic variants (probably font support will be much patchier than if the characters were encoded directly -- just look at the font support for maths standardized variants).

    Andrew



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