From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Fri May 13 2005 - 13:13:44 CDT
Andrey V. Panov wrote:
> In Russian (and other Cyrillic alphabets in former Soviet Union)
> typographic tradition the double-angle quotation marks (guillemotleft and
> guillemotright) usually have shape different from French ones: inner
> angles have less size. Look at attachments. Now for Russian texts are
> used special fonts (typically in CP1251 encoding) with similar glyphs
> instead of ordinary guillemotleft and guillemotright. There is no way to place
> the both variants in an unicode font.
One can certainly put both variants in a Unicode font. One would be the default glyph,
i.e. the glyph mapped directly to the Unicode codepoint in the font cmap table, and the
other would be a glyph variant, accessed through layout tables. The tidy, official way to
handle this kind of script-specific variant in an OpenType font would be to use the
Localised Forms <locl> layout feature, which would associate the correct guillemot form
with the Cyrillic and with Latin text (one could include as many variants as one wanted,
for individual languages, if desirable). Unfortunately, this aspect of OpenType Layout
('language system tagging') is not currently supported in any applications, so the <locl>
feature lookups won't be processed. But the font architecture is all in place for this
kind of thing.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was A century of philosophy, by Hans Georg Gadamer
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