Re: ayar font and several burmese font issues.

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Mar 23 2011 - 18:50:37 CST

  • Next message: Ed: "NOW: Unicode Font Testing WAS: ayar font and several burmese font issues."

    Then there should exist on the Unicode site, a HTML test page showing
    correctly encoded Myanmar sample text, with a reference bitmap
    rendering built with representative glyphs, and a way to change the
    name of the selected font to see if it matches the specs regarding not
    only the per character glyphs (those are already in the Unicode
    charts), but also for the possible alternate glyphs (if they exist),
    the expected reordering, the combinations in significant clusters, the
    expected ligatures (when they are mandatory), a non-ligatured
    rendering (if it's acceptble as a variant).

    Such test pages should be made for all complex scripts (notably all
    Indic scripts). This should even be done independantly of OpenType
    specifications (which are more technical and specific to some font
    technologies), so that it will not just test the font, but also the
    renderer and text layout engine, including in a web browser.

    The PDF given in a prior message also gives some other rendering
    constraints, notably for candidate line breaks for line wraps : this
    can also be tested in HTML by rendering the text in a narrow text
    column (possibly also by allowing the viewing user to rescale the font
    size, to make sure that all candidate line breaks effectively become
    true line wraps) : the reference image in the test page should then be
    shown side-by-side.

    A very basic Javascript would be needed that just adjust some CSS
    properties for the tested text (marked up with a simple CSS class that
    the Javascript will modify in its stylesheet if the user changes the
    selected font name to test and the font size) would be needed, even if
    the page content remains mostly static.

    There are some test pages developed in Wikipedia, but they are still
    incomplete (and lack the Javascript support for allowing someone to
    select another font to test easily). But those pages are pointing
    users to a few compatible fonts, even though the tests are still
    insufficient due to their limited coverage of the script capabilities
    and specificities (even on "rare" letters).

    2011/3/22 Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org>:
    > I think there is some confusion here.  It looks like Ngwe Tun is saying
    > that the Myanmar text on ayarunicodegroup.org is encoded in violation of
    > the correct Unicode *ordering conventions* for the script, not that the
    > encoding is an ASCII hack or something else other than Unicode (which is
    > what "non-Unicode font" and "migrate to Unicode Standards" usually
    > imply).
    >
    > I copied the text from Ayar's home page into BabelPad, a desktop app
    > which uses Uniscribe and has no access to any of Ayar's proprietary
    > fonts (using Code2000 instead), and didn't see any private-use
    > characters.  But since I don't read Myanmar, it's entirely possible that
    > the text as encoded is complete garbage and needs to be reordered as
    > Ngwe Tun says.
    >
    > --
    > Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
    > RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s ­
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >



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