Re: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 19:38:06 EST

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Supporting the Unicode Project (was: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?)"

    At 03:29 PM 12/3/2003, Peter Kirk wrote:

    >Surely if shaping, presentation form etc information is to be encoded in a
    >font or rendering mechanism at all, it must be script-specific not
    >language-specific. That is one reason why there are quite a number of
    >Persian, Urdu etc variant characters in the Arabic script block - they
    >cannot be unified with the otherwise identical Arabic characters because
    >they have different shaping behaviour.

    Both kinds of information may be necessary, depending on the writing system
    (particular application of a particular script to a particular language).
    Encoding a particular glyph as U+00431 in a font cmap table is
    script-specific information; a glyph substitution lookup that replaces that
    glyph with a different one when the language is Serbian is
    language-specific information.

    Note, however, that not everything one may want to happen in a font is
    neatly divisible into script and language. There may be distinct
    typographic traditions in the setting of the same language. Catering for
    these in architectures that are nominally limited to script and language
    distinctions is very tricky.

    John Hudson

    Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com

    Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully
    by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play.
    There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully ... that the
    very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer
                 - Lentricchia & Mclaughlin, _Critical terms for literary study_



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Dec 03 2003 - 20:30:18 EST