William Overington continued:
> However, I feel that the availability of ligatured characters in a font at a
> specific official Unicode code point would be useful for the specific use of
> a person to be able to encode the ligature information directly, so that he
> or she may transcribe the typography of an eighteenth century printed book
> directly "metal type sort to unicode character" and print out the text.
As others have been pointing out, this kind of functionality ("transcrib[ing]
the typography of [X]") is beyond the scope of Unicode, whose primary
intention is the encoding of plain text characters.
What you have in mind might be within the scope of such groups as
the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, which develops the TEI standard. See:
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/tei/
However, such approaches are *explicitly* markup languages for document
description, and are based on SGML-derived concepts such as entity
definition, rather than character encoding per se.
Simply banging on the Unicode Consortium door asking for the encoding
of "quaint" ligatures as characters (or threatening to take your case
to the ISO committee JTC1/SC2/WG2 -- which has the same operating
assumptions about the character/glyph model, in any case) won't solve
the problem you are trying to solve. And as many have commented on
this thread already, font professionals already have better solutions
working, anyway.
> I remember someone on this list using a phrase something like "the great tsu
> nami" (great tidal wave) to describe the attitude that is widely displayed
> by manufacturing industry that everybody is using the very latest equipment.
> The fact is that although some businesses may well have a major changeover,
> in many places if some new equipment is bought complete with new software
> then the older equipment is used elsewhere, so that there are then more
> computers available for use. Perhaps many people will have seen open access
> rooms in colleges where there are a number of newer machines and then
> gradually as one moves to the end of the room there are all sorts of older
> machines with older software being fully utilized by students preparing a
> paper.
I think many of us are well aware of the fact that public education, for
whatever combination of reasons, is often well behind the curve in
being able to upgrade the hardware and software they use in the classrooms.
If the task is just to write a paper in order to learn principles of
exposition, then a 10-year-old machine and 10-year-old software is
perfectly up to the task, but if the task is to make use of the worldwide
web as a resource for gathering information for that paper, then such
a machine is hopelessly outclassed. And chances are, many of the students
using such old machines have access to far better equipment at home:
www.dell.com Dimension 4300 base system:
Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, 128MB SDRAM, 20GB hard drive, 16MB video card,
17 in. monitor, 48x CD ROM drive, Soundblaster Pro 16 sound card, speakers,
56K modem, Windows ME and Microsoft Works Suite 2001: $899.
At $899, that is moving down into the home entertainment electronics
range, along with decent stereos and big TV's.
And arguing that the retention rate of obsolete computer equipment should
drive decision making about use of old font technologies for ligature
display is failing to take into account the development cycle for
character encoding itself.
Say you proceeded to make a formal proposal for a ct ligature character,
and contrary to all the advice you have been hearing on the list, the
UTC decided it passed muster as a character and should be encoded.
From the time you start such a proposal to the time it could be part
of a published version of the standard would be a minimum of two years,
perhaps more. And then there would be a further development lag before
it started showing up, along with the other compatibility Latin ligatures,
with support in platform system software and widely distributed fonts.
By the time that happens, the computer system I provided a price quote
for above is likely to itself seem a quaint toy--with systems having
several times the capability available for lower prices. And importantly,
such capable systems would likely be *required* in order to run whatever
updated, new platform system software and applications might have added support
for the new character. Nobody is going to be going back to rewrite
old Windows 3.1 software to add support for it, I can guarantee that.
>
> However, I feel that there is scope for including characters such as a ct
> ligature in the presentation forms section, perhaps with a note that they
> are to be used only for specific purposes and not for others.
There is always scope for including new characters, when it turns out
they are needed for representing plain text that cannot otherwise
be represented with the current repertoire of encoded characters.
That's why the Unicode Technical Committee keeps adding more
scripts such as Tagalog or Osmanya to the pot.
However, if alternatives exist, as Peter Constable and others have
documented in great detail, there really is no point to clamoring for
such additions. And the likelihood of the UTC or WG2 deciding to
add such unneeded presentation forms is very slim, indeed.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Oct 05 2001 - 14:57:14 EDT