Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters

From: philip chastney (philip_chastney@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Nov 24 2008 - 04:36:14 CST

  • Next message: John H. Jenkins: "Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters"

    --- On Mon, 24/11/08, John Hudson <john@tiro.ca> wrote:

    From: John Hudson <john@tiro.ca>
    Subject: Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters
    To:
    Cc: unicode@unicode.org
    Date: Monday, 24 November, 2008, 5:52 AM

    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.
    oh, absolutely  --  once you have the anchor data, you don't need to build the composite glyphs at all
     
    using OpenType tables brings lots of benefits to the font, but drastically restricts the software it can be used with
     
    I should have said "the average designer of large fonts", because I get the impression that the "average" font designer still finds the full extent of Latin-1 a bit exotic
     
    but with that change, I still think that the average designer of large fonts will want their font to be useful in as many contexts as possible, and will therefore generate as many pre-formed composites as possible
    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
    a very interesting paper  --  thanks for the link   . . .   /phil

     

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