Re: Ie abbreviation character

From: Lars Marius Garshol (larsga@garshol.priv.no)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 05:38:18 EDT


* John Hudson
|
| My colleagues at the Typography Dept. of the University of Reading and
| at the Central School in London have taken to using the term
| 'typeform' to refer to a typographic element that, when seen, is
| understood to be a single entity, regardless of how it is encoded or
| displayed. I think the Norwegian contraction you are describing
| probably constitutes a typeform, at least for you as a reader of
| Norwegian

I would agree with that.

| The thing to keep in mind is that the appearance of a typeform does
| not imply anything about how it may be or should be encoded or
| displayed.

I agree that appearance is not the criterion for how many components
it should be made up from. I thought decisions about how to encode
characters were (among other things) decided by the semantics of the
characters, but I realize I don't know what that means in practice.

| If you accept the prevailing argument that there is no need to
| encode your contraction as a single, precomposed character in
| Unicode, I can still think of half a dozen different ways in which
| the typeform could be displayed using varying complexities of glyph
| processing.

I neither accept nor reject it; I am trying to understand it.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >



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