Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters

From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Nov 25 2008 - 01:52:00 CST

  • Next message: Hans Aberg: "Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters"

    On 11/23/2008 9:40 PM, John Hudson wrote:
    > Hans Aberg wrote:
    >
    >> Yes, this might be viewed as a form of kerning.
    >
    > It is best to avoid confusing mark positioning with kerning, since
    > these are necessarily separate procedures. Horizontal spatial
    > relationships between letters, including kerning (i.e. pair-specific
    > adjustment of individual letter advance widths) needs be independent
    > of mark positioning and, indeed, to ignore the presence of mark glyphs
    > in the string (except in exceptional cases that are typeface-specific
    > and need to be controlled at the font level).
    If you kern a pair Wx, where W and x stand as examples for the actual
    letters involved, wouldn't it matter if you placed a rather large mark
    on top of the x, e.g. one of the Latin superscripted letters? I could
    imagine, that in such a case, and across different typeface designs,
    there would be a problem tucking in the "x" as far under the Wing of
    the W as it would go if it was unadorned.

    I think Hans was not too far off in his comparison: there are aspects of
    mark placement, that - to a lay person - seem reminiscent of kerning, in
    the way that hey depend on the details of the shape of the base
    character and accent(s) to allow them to be tucked in more closely. For
    kerning, the constraint comes from a desire for uniform type color, for
    mark positioning, the constraint comes from the very limited space
    available in the line for placing, let alone stacking of accents above
    and below characters.

    So there are differences as well. I don't think his intention was to
    usurp a term from the holy vocabulary ;-)

    A./



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