Re: Transcribing old documents into Unicode compatible document files.

From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 11:38:06 EDT

  • Next message: Marco Cimarosti: "RE: character "stories""

    William Overington wrote on 05/05/2003 05:52:43 AM:

    > I wonder if I could please put forward an idea that fontmakers might like
    to
    > consider please.

    Once you're finished wondering, feel free to present your suggestion to the
    font makers on the list. And I wonder if I may please suggest that one
    might consider avoiding the practice of writing using unnecessary
    periphrasis please. :-)

    > Whilst recognizing that adding a lot of extra accented
    > characters for languages with other-than-large user populations to a font
    > may not be the way to go for most fonts, how about adding four or five so
    > that each font supports a language with an other-than-large user
    population?
    > One font might support one language, another font another language.

    What? A type designer is going to pick some arbitrary four or five extra
    accented characters to support in addition to (say) Windows cp1252? And
    we'll see what small-population languages any given font happens to
    support? So, perhaps if they're lucky the approx. 200,000 speakers of
    Mbandja (say), having looked at 389 fonts, will finally find a font
    somewhat akin to Brush Script MT that happens to support their orthography?
    And the benefit to either the type designer or the user community is?

    Some of us who are really working in a serious way with small-population
    language communities are taking a rather different approach toward this:
    provide comprehensive coverage of Latin characters. See
    http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/ for one example.

    - Peter

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Peter Constable

    Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
    7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
    Tel: +1 972 708 7485



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon May 05 2003 - 12:30:44 EDT