Re: fonts for U7.0 scripts

From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 18:21:03 -0700

Peter is correct.

The only fonts that should be released to the public are those that are
Unicode encoded and have the correct shaping tables.

Unlike the public, the code chart editors for Unicode have tools that
can correctly handle not only ASCII-hacked fonts as well as PUA-assigned
fonts, but also fonts that use the "wrong" Unicode encoding (because
they were designed for an earlier draft with different code point
assignments). These tools ignore all shaping tables, so the lack of such
tables isn't an issue.

The documents created by the code charts editors are no editable in the
normal sense, so they can be published without causing problems, like
establishing a de-facto encoding. They don't contain running text in
these fonts, so there isn't an issue with search - the searchable
contents are all character names, annotations etc in Latin letters and
digits.

Releasing such fonts to the public would establish a de-facto
non-sanctioned encoding, because people could create (and interchange)
running text using them.

A./

On 10/23/2014 6:02 PM, Peter Constable wrote:
>
> Sure: People find a font that isn’t a truly functional,
> Unicode-conformant font for script X and…
>
> -They try using it, find it doesn’t display text as expected, and
> conclude that Unicode doesn’t work for their script
>
> -The font has glyphs mapped from ASCII characters; they try typing and
> it seems to display their text as desired, so they start generating
> content. Now we have data interop problems.
>
> -The font kinda works, but not perfectly. They decide that they can
> fix it by just changing some of the glyphs to certain presentation
> forms and by adding certain other glyphs on some unused code
> positions. Then they start generating content. Now we have data
> interop problems.
>
> The last scenario is really similar to the serious problems we have
> now for Myanmar. Iow, this isn’t just hypothetical.
>
> Peter
>
> *From:*Shriramana Sharma [mailto:samjnaa_at_gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 23, 2014 4:48 PM
> *To:* Peter Constable
> *Cc:* Andrew West; Andrew Glass (WINDOWS); Unicode Public
> *Subject:* Re: fonts for U7.0 scripts
>
> On Thursday, October 23, 2014, Peter Constable <petercon_at_microsoft.com
> <mailto:petercon_at_microsoft.com>> wrote:
>
> . But publishing fonts created for the purpose of chart production
> may lead to all kinds of problems if they are not truly
> functional, Unicode-conformant fonts -
>
> Dear Peter,
>
> Can you clarify what "all kinds of problems" you foresee?
>
>
>
> --
> Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Unicode mailing list
> Unicode_at_unicode.org
> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode

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Received on Thu Oct 23 2014 - 20:22:01 CDT

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