Introduction to the Unicode Character-Glyph Model: What you need to know about processing and rendering multilingual text
Ed Hart - The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Intended Audience: |
Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts |
Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate |
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 high-end typography or 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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