Martin Kotulla <martin-k@softmaker.de>:
MK> http://www.font.org has a nice rundown on the design of Polish
MK> diacritics. They go to great lengths to point out that the Polish
MK> "kreska" is not identical with the acute accent in many other languages.
MK> The kreska is steeper than the acute accent.
MK> Too bad the Unicode Consortium didn't hear about this ... <g>
MK> Is this just typographical nitpicking or a real issue for Polish
MK> readers?
This is a real issue. A text in Polish typeset with the Spanish form
of `o acute' looks most definitely wrong. So does French text typeset
with the (dialectal) Polish `e kreska'. Similarly, you should not
typeset a French text using German umlauts, or a German text using
French diereses. (There are many other similar examples; one may
argue that small s has a different shape in German than in French.)
However, in all the cases above the text is legible without effort
(albeit with a vague feeling that something is wrong), so you might
consider this as ``typographical nit-picking''.
I am sure that members of the Unicode consortium know about this.
However, this is a non-issue as far as the character encoding is
concerned: Unicode often chose to unify glyph variants as long as no
confusion is possible (the best known example is that of Han (Chinese,
Japanese, Korean) characters). Disunifying such characters causes a
number of technical and political problems that have been discussed at
length, on this list and elsewhere.
This is something you should accept: there is no such thing as a
proper typography that works throughout the Latin-script-using world.
Typography is an important part of a coutry's culture, and is perforce
locale-specific. The solution, of course, is to have a smart
rendering engine that chooses glyph variants and typesetting rules
according to language. There are provisions for this in Unicode
(Plane 14 language tags), in HTML and XML (``lang=...''), in OpenType
(locale-specific glyph substitution).
As OpenType is not widely supported yet, and language-specific glyph
substitution is not supported at all for European languages, I would
suggest that font designers create locale-specific versions of their
fonts. I believe that there exists a market in Poland for fonts that
support proper Polish typography (unlike the Monotype/Microsoft WGL4
fonts distributed with Windows).
For more information, I suggest that you should contact Adam Twardoch,
the author of the font.org pages (see CC), as well as Yannis
Haralambous, the author of Omega.
Sincerely,
Juliusz Chroboczek
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:53 EDT