Introduction to the Unicode Character-Glyph Model: What you need to Know about Processing and Rendering Multilingual Text
Edwin Hart - The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Presented by John Jenkins - Apple Computer, Inc.
| Intended Audience: |
Manager, Software Engineer, Systems Analyst |
| Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced |
The advent of multilingual information processing with
Unicode requires the designer to have a deeper knowledge
of rendering characters for display and printing than is
necessary for a single script, like Latin. Rendering
technology that is adequate for one language of the Latin
script, like English, may prove totally inadequate for
scripts such as Arabic or Devanagari. This presentation
introduces a framework to characterize a character in terms
of its information, associated shape (or glyph) and the
relationships between these two attributes. It first
differentiates between the domains of characters and of
glyphs, and when it is appropriate to do processing in one
domain versus the other. Next, it describes three different
technologies used to render Unicode characters into glyphs.
Finally, it describes several design considerations.
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