For all the discussion that went on this week during the
conference about glyph variants for CJK, I never thought to ask
about this:
Because of the near ubiquitous use of Latin, I'd imagine that
anyone shipping a font for a non-Latin script would probably
also include glyphs for at least the Basic Latin and maybe also
Latin-1 blocks.
Now, I want to build an Ethiopic font. Ethiopic has a full stop
that consists of 4 dots, but I understand that there is also a
single dot (similar to latin full stop) used for abbreviations.
(I'll call the Latin/Ethiopic single dot characters "period" to
avoid confusion.) Now, the period glyph that's needed to go
with Ethiopic glyphs is (typically) slightly larger and
slightly more widely spaced than would be the period glyph
that's needed for to go with Latin glyphs. So, here's a glyph
variation problem that has nothing to do with CJK.
Of course, we heard from Dirk Meyer and from John Jenkins that
such problems can be solved in OpenType and AAT. But for the
moment, not many apps out there have the infrastructure built
in to deal with that yet.
The only options I can think of for existing apps are:
- Just make the glyph mapped from U+0027 the one suited for
Ethiopic, since the font is primarily intended for Ethiopic,
and only secondarily for Latin; i.e. there's no period glyph
suited for Latin.
- Do the above for the Ethiopic glyph, and map the Latin glyph
from U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER.
- Map the Latin period from U+0027 and the Ethiopic period from
U+2024.
(I'm facing similar issues for Yi, but with Yi I can also
consider using U+FF0E FULLWIDTH FULL STOP.)
Any opinions on the best solution?
Peter
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