Re: "Missing character" glyph

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 15:49:09 EDT


John H. Jenkins <jenkins at apple dot com> wrote:

> There has been considerable uproar in the font development community
> lately about Unicode making unwarranted assumptions about how fonts
> work. I think it would be improper for us to add a character to the
> standard on the basis of "font technology X solves the problem".

This is precisely one of the points I was trying to make in the
ZWJ-ligation thread a few weeks ago. It would be improper for Unicode
to do *anything* on the basis of "font technology X solves the problem".
(Some were suggesting ZWJ was unnecessary for ligation control because
the required intelligence could be built into OpenType fonts, which
implies that OpenType is a core component of Unicode.)

Likewise, if "Linear Tamil" ends up being adopted and Unicode has to
support both old and new orthographies, it would be wrong to presume
pre-emptively that no changes will be ever needed in Unicode because the
changes can all be delegated to OpenType internal tables.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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