Re: Unifon

From: Karl Pentzlin <karl-pentzlin_at_acssoft.de>
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2011 19:23:27 +0200

Am Sonntag, 3. Juli 2011 um 18:13 schrieb Christoph Päper:

CP> In conclusion, most of this should probably be handled at the (smart) font level.

Today, many not yet encoded characters (Latin-like and others)
can be approximately represented by smart font technology.
(See e.g. http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n4047.pdf
 which contains many ideas ideas how to mimic metrical symbols by
 diacritical marks).
However, doing such is hiding the identity of characters, and making
the correct reading of texts dependent of the use of specific fonts.
This is a fallback into the 1980s when e.g. Greek fonts were developed
which used the ASCII codepoints.
Also, this enables a possible correct reading only to human readers,
not to data processing systems like searching, or storing in databases
from where text can be retrieved in environments preferring other fonts.

We talk of character encoding here. That means, in first line, we have
to decide whether a written thing has an identity qualifying it as a
character, before we consider smart tricks to represent its graphic
appearance by a modified use of existing characters.

Smart font technology, as it has developed now, in fact is a
mighty tool.
But this does not mean that everybody who can use such a hammer
should regard every problem as a nail.

- Karl
Received on Sun Jul 03 2011 - 12:27:00 CDT

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