Re: half-brackets in the Supplemental Punctuation block

From: Mark E. Shoulson <mark_at_kli.org>
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2012 21:19:30 -0400

On 06/06/2012 08:11 PM, Stephan Stiller wrote:
> Hi Philippe,
>
> Thanks for your opinion. The examples I've just checked looked like
> "zero-width or almost so" (Friedl) and "very narrow" (in a Japanese
> dictionary, ISBN 978-4-7674-2315-9) to me. I am pretty sure I've seen
> zero-width with either kana or romaji, just can't find a reference
> right now. I think there are use instances. What "should" be done is
> also a good question, and perhaps the answer isn't as obvious as I
> thought, but these considerations make me wonder whether a font is
> really free to make a choice about zero-width or not for any given
> Unicode symbol. If not, I'm wondering whether Unicode
> could/should/does make that binary decision. And in either case I'm
> wondering for /which/ characters in Unicode zero-width is an option
> (or obligatory).

Besides the fact that font designers can and will do exactly as they
please... Even if Unicode does specify "non-zero width," a designer can
always make that arbitrarily small, as close to zero as we like. Some
character descriptions may *recommend* features for the font designer,
mostly to clarify what the character is that the codepoint is meant to
represent.

Though I can see that maybe when Unicode specifies "zero-width" it
really should be and programs need to be able to rely on that.

~mark
Received on Wed Jun 06 2012 - 20:21:48 CDT

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