Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jul 19 2003 - 17:34:59 EDT

  • Next message: Deborah Goldsmith: "Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)"

    On Saturday, July 19, 2003 9:15 PM, Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com> wrote:

    > > So fonts containing these glyphs could be designed to display these
    > > glyphs, in a way similar to the current assignment of control
    > > pictures.
    >
    > Um, that's what the Last Resort font does, outside of Unicode
    > encoding space. (I don't think PUA characters are used, actually, but
    > I could be wrong.

    I see that Apple maps it to a PostScript dictionary namespace, but this
    seems limitative for the implementation, when almost all foundries are
    converting now their Type1 fonts to OpenType, which is much more
    efficient, but still requires some entry point with a numeric assignment
    (a glyph ID will still require an input codepoint to seek relevant glyphs,
    and a PUA still requires a table of conversion from ranges to that
    font-specific PUA, and a TrueType font not marked as Unicode
    compatible would use direct glyph IDs from a externally defined
    character set similar to legacy charsets, except that they can't be
    mapped to Unicode).

    I'm still convinced that these glyphs are much more informative than
    a default glyph showing a "?", a white rectangle, or a black losange
    with a mirrored white "?"... And Unicode also uses these glyphs
    in the index page for its charmaps, but they are shown as poor
    bitmaps (may be the PDF or book version use your glyphs in
    a document-embedded font)

    How were your glyphs contributed? With SVG graphics containing
    character objects and drawing primitives (it seems the simplest
    way to derive them, using the table shown in Apple's web page,
    with some exceptions for unassigned, reserved, forbidden or
    surrogates symbols which require a distinct design)?

    -- 
    Philippe.
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