Peter Constable wrote:
>
> Indeed there's no alternative, and so I don't knock them in the slightest.
> But there's also no question that their TrueType font is a hack of Unicode,
> as the attached GIF makes clear: e.g. U+0031 DIGIT ONE is mapped to glyph
> ID 20, which is clearly not a digit one in that font.
>
Actually, it is the number one.
We disagree on where the use of term "hack" is appropriate,
but agree on many more important items.
The Naadaa font isn't offered as a Unicode font and doesn't pretend
to be one. Since TTF specs don't provide for custom character sets,
standard platform and encoding ID's must be used. They might
have changed the post script names, though...
Such fonts aren't hacks because they aren't Times New Roman
with the insides scooped out and new glyphs added. They
aren't hacks because no-one had to break any encryption or
steal any passwords. There's nothing surreptitious or
underhanded about the development of these fonts, it's
all quite above-board.
In many cases, they are true works of art produced by
typographers using whatever level of font editing technology
they could acquire. The font editing tools enabled them to
create their fonts from scratch, but they had to use the editor's
built in mapping features in order for their fonts to display.
I couldn't bring myself to call a masterpiece like mayan.ttf a hack:
http://www.themeworld.com/cgi-bin/preview.pl/fonts/mayan.zip
(Mayan is on the Roadmap to Plane One, but it doesn't look as
though there's been any detailed proposal yet.)
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT