Re: Terminal Graphics Proposal

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 01 1998 - 20:02:00 EDT


Frank da Cruz wrote on 1998-10-01 14:34 UTC:
> My concern is that the pictures in the Unicode book go horizontally.

Not much love went into the U+24XX glyphs used to print Unicode 2.0.
The OCR symbols look quite strange as well.

Unicode is a character set, not a font. Keeping things readable is the
duty of the font designer. Of course most good fonts will have the Control
Pictures with diagonal letters. The ISO 10646-1 standard shows them
all nicely diagonally. It is a good idea for font designers to have
BOTH the Unicode 2.0 and the ISO 10646 standard on their desk, to see a few
glyph variations as the two standards were printed using different fonts.

> Although
> I do not claim to be an expert on Unicode fonts, I have never seen one that
> implemented this block, so I don't actually know how it looks.

One X11 ISO 10646-1 font that implements this block is available from

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz

See the included README file for instructions on how to have a quick
look at it with xfd. I don't claim that the control pictures in there
are extremely beautiful (doing ENQ in a 6x13 matrix is quite
challenging), but I think it is quite readable.

> However, I'd
> say that the horizontal arrangement would make it extremely difficult for the
> viewer to discern the cell boundaries, as in:
>
> NULSOHSTXETXEOTENQACKBELDELNAKSYNETBCANSUBESCCANACKSSASS3SPAEPACSISCI
>
> And thus, at minumum, the table in the book should be altered to show all
> control pictures arranged diagonally, and all future control picture additions
> should also be arranged that way.

I agree that the glyphs used to print the ISO 10646-1 standard are
much better here than those used in the Unicode 2.0 standard for the U+24XX
range.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>



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