From: Adam Twardoch (list.adam@twardoch.com)
Date: Thu Jan 25 2007 - 22:48:33 CST
John Hudson wrote:
> Right, but deciding to use fraktur is itself a stylistic preference.
> I'm not sure that going through a text that one has decided to set in
> fraktur -- or which might possible be displayed in Fraktur -- and
> inserting ZWJ everywhere one wanted ligation to occure and/or ZWNJ
> everywhere one didn't want it is a sensible way to enable the
> orthographic impact of this deicision.
It is. It’s like typing "k" vs. "c" or "s" vs. "z" in some languages (if
they’re homophones). Thw immediate problem is that there are still no
cross-platform compatible input methods for scientific publishing that
would go beyond a typical QWERTY keyboard layout. (All the "special"
input methods are a bit insular). But given that you solve the problem
of typing ZWJ and ZWNJ, the rest is a matter of editing the text. Just
like you have to make sure in regular text that your quotation marks or
dashes are right, in fraktur publishing, you need to make sure that your
long vs. short "s"s are where they should be, and that the ligatures are
where they should be.
> There isn't even any way to signal to an application or layout engine
> that a given font is fraktur.
It’s an interesting case. First of all, saying "fraktur" is wrong
because fraktur is only a subset of blackletter. In early 20th century,
blackletter was considered a different writing system from "Antiqua"
(Roman alphabet) for example in Germany. There was an opposition between
the Roman alphabet and blackletter. When the Nazis abandoned
blackletter, it was as if they switched to a different writing system.
In OpenType, it is actually possible to share Unicode codepoints between
different writing system. The languagesystem tagging mechanism allows to
specify that a certain glyph represents the codepoint U+0041 in Latin
script (script tag "latn") or it represents the codepoint U+0041 in
Blackletter script (potentially, script tag e.g. "blak"). What do you
think, John?
-- Adam Twardoch | Language Typography Unicode Fonts OpenType | twardoch.com | silesian.com | fontlab.net
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