At 00:11 -0700 7/5/1999, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>On Sun, 4 Jul 1999, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>
>> Never mind him, go for whoever decided that 11,172 precomposed Johab Hangul
>> syllables should be in KSC 5601 and hence in Unicode instead of being font
>> glyphs. (Unicode Version 2.0, pp. 6-114--115, 7-420--469) :-[
>
>It is not of personal importance for me, since we will have very few users
>of Far East scripts here! But Arabic is the script I use everyday, so I
>will let some Hangul writer punish the other guy... ;)
>
>--Roozbeh
Don't worry, I wasn't serious. I've been through all the Arabic
presentation forms, and I agree with you. We should have gotten rid of
them, and the Johab Korean, and the circled numbers, and lots of others.
Except, of course, that we can't, since one of the principles of Unicode is
to guarantee round-trip conversions from legacy character sets.
But does that mean that national standards bodies can continue to jerk us
around as the KSC people did? I think we have to say at some point that
Unicode will not offer round-trip conversions for all future character set
standards, no matter how badly designed, and that the standards bodies have
to take on the task of promoting better font design. Somehow. I don't know
how, at this point, but the question has to be raised.
It seems that some more education is required, either of
* font format designers who need to provide for glyphs that aren't characters
* font designers who need to add glyphs that aren't characters
* programmers of rendering engines, to use the glyphs that aren't characters
* computer users, that the problem is being dealt with
I would suppose that in TrueType fonts, which carry Unicode encoding, the
glyphs that aren't characters have to be given Unicode codes anyway, in the
Private Use areas. Is that right?
If so, the font has to contain the mapping information for presentation
glyphs, and there should be no chance for confusion between glyph encodings
in different fonts using different internal mappings. Is that right?
BTW, I'm sure I've seen a dotless j in a math font (TeX?). Are there any in
text fonts?
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