On 08/04/2002 09:35:40 AM "Carl W. Brown" wrote:
>I presume that the user has to know that the character cannot be
displayed.
>However using a special glyph has a number of problems:
>
>1) You do not know if the character is missing and the glyph is
substituted
>or if the text really encodes the glyph.
Since use of the proposed character for controlled display of a .notdef
glyph makes sense only in meta-descriptive situations, it should (in any
reasonable use) be obvious from context when one is seeing this character
rather than some other character being unsupported by the given font.
>2) If you see multiple missing characters, you do not know if it is the
same
>character or different characters.
Generally the case now. The only exception is Apple's fallback font, which
at least let's you know what the script is, but not the actual character.
>3) If you call for help there is no way of reporting the values that are
>mis-encoded.
Again, nothing new.
>Fujitsu had an elegant solution for JEF encoding...
>XX
>XX
...
>This would work well for Unicode BMP...
I hope you're not suggesting that fonts contain thousands of such glyphs
-- one for each character that doesn't have a "proper" glyph?
>Another alternative is to encode the plane number differently in a more
>compact form since there are only 17 planes. You might then also reserve
an
>18th iteration to indicate an invalid plane character with the leading
bytes
>only.
>
>For example:
>
>A single bar with no dots below the bar is BMP (plane 0)
Average users are going to understand this stuff? (I guess that probably
could at least describe it over the phone to a tech support person.)
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@sil.org>
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