RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 08:17:25 EST

  • Next message: Philippe Verdy: "RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?"

    Michael Everson writes:
    > John Hudson wrote:
    > > Michael Everson wrote:
    > > >Philippe Verdy wrote:
    > > > > Such a font seems easy to create automatically by using the
    > > > > basic glyphs of a base font containing the ASCII letters and
    > > > > digits, and a source text file giving the name and range of
    > > > > Unicode code point blocks, as well as a representative
    > > > > character or string.
    > > >
    > > > You don't know much about drawing fonts, evidently.
    > >
    > >To be fair to Philippe, what he suggests isn't too far beyond what
    > >is currently possible with the latest generation of
    > >Python-scriptable font tools.
    >
    > If you say so. I find that I cannot imagine how I would have drawn
    > the glyphs by some automated process.

    Why that? Couldn't most of the LastResort glyphs be generated in a
    a SVG-like vector format, using glyphs found in other fonts, plus
    very few specific glyphs that need handdrawing ?

    It seems clear to me that most of these glyphs are composed from
    other glyphs that could have been borrowed from other fonts. This
    allows then to generate the needed collection of glyphs, assigned
    a name formed automatically with the Unicode block name, before
    compiling them in a TrueType file where the cmap will also be
    script-generated from the UCD properties.

    So the effective set of SVG glyph designs that need to be manually
    created seems small for me: you need two rounded boxes to create
    the border, and a few specific variants for the internal area of
    the glyph used to represent non-characters.

    Using script languages (inclusing Korn Shell or JavaScript) to
    generate a font is not ridiculous for me, as it helps maintaining
    the font design consistently without forgetting cases. These
    scripts are part of the manual design, but they don't necessarily
    need drawing abilities (however it requires knowledge of the data
    tables needed to create a fully functional font). You don't need
    to publish these scripts, but they are certainly good tools that
    a typographer could ask to a programmer.

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