On Thu, 9 Sep 1999, John Hudson wrote:
> I would hope that when my fellow type designers are called upon to design
> fonts for IPA, they will understand enough about that notation system not
> to provide a single storey lowercase a glyph for U+0061. In other words,
> this is pretty much a non-issue, because competent type designers works
> with the requirements of a writing system as their brief. IPA is a
> specialised writing system, and I don't think anyone expects it to be
> possible or even desirable to produce, for example, an IPA font in the
> style of 18th Century roundhand script.
It is possible, and perhaps desirable, to produce an IPA font where the
default <a> for use in latin orthrogaphy, is a nonhook-a. Similarly with
strange and non-strange g.
IPA has got a LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G as well. The corresponding
character, LATIN SMALL LETTER NONSCRIPT G, (or similar) has been unified
with LATIN SMALL LETTER G, in a similar demonstration of brokenness :
where two glyphs that are used of variants of one grapheme, and used
contrastitively in other situations, have been encoded as two code points,
rather than the needed three.
This adds to the IPA brokeness in Unicode. I hope we see :
LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH HOOK,
LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH FUNNY THING BELOW,
LATIN SMALL LETTER THETA,
LATIN SMALL LETTER CHI,
LATIN SMALL LETTER BETA,
in Unicode 4. There are only 5 of these. There will not be any more, and
without them, IPA support in Unicode is broken.
-- Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT