At 11:24 1/29/2002, Stefan Persson wrote:
> > Stefan Persson wrote:
> > > In old Swedish there was a tradition of writing words of
> > > foreign origin in the Roman type of letters (in Swedish
> > > referred to as "antikva"), while the rest of the words
> > > were written in Fraktur.
...
>And so what? I thought the meaning of Unicode was that all languages should
>be fully supported in plain text, using one single font to displaying all of
>the characters. With old Swedish, this isn't possible.
What you are describing seems to be a typographic convention used for a
language in publishing at a particular time. I do not think that
typographic conventions can or should be supported at the plain text level:
this is what markup and layout are for. A lot of 19th Century English title
pages combine roman and blackletter script variants on the same page, but
this is not something I would expect to be able to represent in plain text.
The old Swedish use of roman and blackletter appears to be systematic and
to represent information about the origins of the words being used, but
this remains a typographic convention and not a fundamental aspect of the
Latin script used to write Swedish.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jan 29 2002 - 15:22:51 EST