From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Sun Nov 23 2008 - 23:52:25 CST
philip chastney wrote:
> once a table like that becomes available, your average font designer
> will stick anchors on all possible base characters, and matching anchors
> on all likely markings, and import the table into his or her font, as an
> OpenType table
But once you have the anchor data, you don't need to build the composite
glyphs at all: you can use the anchor data to position marks on-the-fly
using OpenType GPOS lookups. Also, since many marks share common
anchors, e.g. above-centre, below-centre, etc., you can hit far more
potential combinations using generic anchor positioning than you can by
building composite glyphs.
Some background to these comments might be useful: in 1997-98, Microsoft
hired me to conduct a research project on glyph-requirements for
languages using a variety of scripts. The results of his research, and
the query tool that made use of the data, was presented at the 1998
ATypI conference in Lyon*. It is as a result of that experience, and
subsequent font work over the past decade, that I am thoroughly
convinced that building flexible, dynamic mark positioning data, capable
of appropriately displaying arbitrary combinations of base+mark and
mark+mark is not only more sensible that trying to document everything
that occurs in all the world's texts, but also more realistic.
* See http://www.tiro.nu/Articles/sylfaen_article.pdf
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com You can't build a healthy democracy with people who believe in little green men from Venus. -- Arthur C. Clark
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