From: Michael \(michka\) Kaplan (michka@trigeminal.com)
Date: Sun May 11 2003 - 14:40:13 EDT
From: "Jungshik Shin" <jshin@mailaps.org>
> Recently I found some fonts have visible glyphs for invisible characters
> (that I _guess_ are supposed to have no visual effect) such as U+2062
> (the glyph for U+2062 is dotted 'x' inside a dotted box). With these
> kind of fonts present, a bit naive(??) approach of searching for glyphs
> in all the fonts on the system would turn the 'invisible' to the visible.
> For instance, the following MathML snippet was rendered with
> a visible glyph (⁢ == U+2062) by Mozilla.
>
> <mi>a</mi><mo>⁢</mo><mi>c</mi>
Yes, you mentioned this in your mails from a few days ago....
> My questions are:
>
> (1) Is a font to blame for having visible glyphs for U+2062 and
> similar characters. I think U+2062 and similar characters are different
> from ZWJ/ZWNJ and other 'control' characters that do have visual effect
> in such context as Indic scripts, Arabic script and expressing authorial
> intent about ligature in Latin and other scripts)
You did not mention specifically what font is doing this, which makes it
hard to claim that a font should be "blamed" for anything. What is/are the
font(s) and where did you get it/them?
> (2) What's the normative (if there's such a thing) rendering behavior
> of a sequence with U+2062-like characters? For instance,
> does '<U+0061><U+2062><U+0062>' have to be rendered exactly the same
> way as 'ab'? Perhaps, it'd better be left up to implementations.
> Some implementations (typographic tradition?) may use different
> kerning(?) or add a very thin space between 'a' and 'b'. Others would
> just treat them identically.
I believe you will find it in the default ignorable list. It should likely
have no visible rendering unless there is some higher level reason for there
to be such -- which gets us back to asking what/where/why/etc.
> (3) Is there any way (IF it's allowed) to express the authorial intent
> to render U+2062-like characters with visible glyphs?
How can others know what is in the mind of people who developed a font
without knowing who they are and for what the font was develoed?
Ignoring the normative/conformance side of the question for a moment -- life
is about dealing with things are they are, right? So any application should
do what it thinks best and if a font works to supplant this then it is up to
the app to either let the font do what it wants to or to keep it from doing
so....
MichKa
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