From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jul 12 2007 - 15:53:49 CDT
John Hudson wrote:
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
> > These symbols are currently not listed exhaustively, and this does not
> > help making the notations easily interoperable, as many font designers
> > will forget to implement them, by ignorance of the expected needs and
> > lack of interaction between those designers that have implemented
> > something.
>
> As discussed previously with regard to the Lao and Thai generic bases,
> font developers are only part of the solution. I can put glyph positioning
> features in fonts easily enough, but it does no good if layout engines
> separate the background characters into different glyph runs.
Another good question to ask: are all possible generic bases that may occur
in a script applicable to all languages? I presume that some bases will work
in languages that don't have easily confusable letters as thy use only a
subset of the script, but not with others.
So should it be a property of the script (and so, documented in the Unicode
chapter describing it), or of languages written with it (and so, listed for
example in the CLDR database, in an entry similar to those used for listing
examplar and auxiliary letters, or in some auxiliary data file of the UCD,
or in some documents or data file for font designers like in OpenType
specifications, where it would also help implementers of renderers to
consider these cases)?
Can we agree on the terminology to adopt when referring to these characters?
"generic base" or "generic base symbols" (as they are not intended to be
letters but used as a distinct notation to be replaced by actual letters).
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