At 04:28 AM 11/7/00 -0800, Lukas Pietsch wrote:
>The misunderstanding of the diacritic-like adscript iota is unfortunately
>still spreading through the world because the unicode demonstration charts
>show it this way. Most font designers have followed what the charts seemed
>to dictate to them (even when they knew better), with the result that now
>there are very few fonts that show these characters correctly.
It bears repeating that:
The purpose of the charts is to convey the *identity* of the character
at a given code location, not to provide definite guidance to its
typography
Therfore:
(a) the glyphs shown in the Unicode charts are not normative
(b) the glyphs shown may exaggerate some features
(c) the glyphs shown may be reduced in size to fit the cell
(d) the glyphs shown may be shifted left/right/up/down to fit the cell
(e) the glyphs shown may show only one of several possible shapes for
the character
(f) the glyphs shown may reflect the poor quality of the font(s)
available to the authors
In other words:
- The charts are meant for people who need to decide which code point
goes with a given character.
- Anybody copying the charts in their font design will get chart fonts,
not text fonts.
Having said that, where possible we do try to stick with the most common,
times-like forms, and we try to indicate in notes or text if we made a
different choice, here or there. Often we also give a reason for our
choice.
However, even if we didn't, this is *never* an excuse for anybody to
create a bad font, especially if they "knew better" as the writer alleges.
As always, the worst thing anyone can do is to just go look at the
charts on http://www.unicode.org/charts/ and not consult the text
of the book as well. The charts are pretty detailed, but there's a
lot of detailed information about characters in the text - and for
good reason.
A./
Charts & Co.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:15 EDT