From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Mon Mar 21 2005 - 21:06:01 CST
Alec Coupe wrote:
> Dear list members,
>
>
> I would like to know why 'lower case a' is converted to 'script a'
> when it is italicized in unicode. This is a considerable hindrance in
> linguistic transcription because 'lower case a' represents Cardinal
> Vowel 4, while 'script a' represents Cardinal Vowel 5. For
> non-linguists, the difference is demonstrated by the Australian
> English versus the southern British English pronunciation of 'a'
> in 'father'. Since the majority of publishers require language
> examples to be differentiated from text by italic face, this
> potentially makes unicode a less than adequate font for linguistic
> description.
>
Unicode isn't a font at all. It's a list of characters. Unicode
doesn't deal with things like "italic". It happens that most Latin book
fonts use a two-storey 'a' in Roman text and a one-storey (cursive) 'a'
in italic, because that's the typographic convention in Roman texts. If
you want an "italic" that doesn't make that switch, consider using a
slanted Roman font, if you can find or create one.
Just one more time: Unicode isn't a font; take up your problem with the
designers of the fonts in question.
~mark
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