From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2003 - 20:07:20 EST
At 08:54 AM 11/9/2003, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>Yes that was the intent of my suggestion, I don't say that this must be
>done. But what would be wrong if a font was created for the Tifinagh script
>that would display Latin-based glyphs with diacritics rather than historic
>glyphs?
This sort of thing -- one of my type design colleagues uses the term
'masquerading' -- is fairly common in the world of 8-bit encodings, most
often with glyphs for non-Latin alphabets masquerading in an ANSI Latin 1
character set. So all you are really suggesting is having Latin glyphs
masquerading as Tifinagh characters. The problem with this is that it
misleads users to assume that the text is encoded as Latin characters, so
they switch fonts because they want to use a different Latin typeface, or
they send the document to another user thinking they have lots of Latin
fonts that will display it, and then wonder why it isn't working anymore.
I've given a lot of thought to transliteration and transcription at the
glyph level: we've even made fonts with custom a OpenType Layout feature
that transliterated Inukititut syllabic characters to Latin equivalents
using glyph substitution. And my conclusion is that transliteration and
transcription should be hanlded at the character processing level, not at
the glyph level. Apart from anything else, handling it at the character
level, e.g. in word processor macros, gives greater freedom and flexibility
to the user. Users should be able to display Berber text in Latinised form
using any font on their system that includes the appropriate characters;
they should not be tied to displaying in a single font that happens to have
Latin glyphs masquerading as Tifinagh.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges
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