William Overington wrote (in response to Tex Texin),
>>
>>A holomap sounds like what I would draw were I to program the Holodeck
>>on the USS Enterprise. It should at least refer to encoding of
>>3-Dimensional characters which can be viewed from any direction. (To my
>>mind anyway.)
>
>Well, the hol- prefix can be used in words such as holography and hologram,
>yet there are also words such as holistic and holograph.
>
Right. A holographic will must be entirely in the handwriting
of the testator in order to be a valid instrument, but there's
nothing requiring it to be a 3-D simulation as well.
>The holodeck feature on the USS Enterprise is very interesting and has, in
>fact, led me to some interesting ideas about fonts. My favourite item in
>the whole of Star Trek is the episode "Elementary, dear Data", which takes
> <snip>
Mine's Seven of Nine.
>>But I share Peter's sense that there is no problem to be solved and
>>therefore a discussion of the term to improve it, is not warranted or
>>useful. If the term were distinguishing one concept from another, or
>>having a great deal of precision, or rooted in industry terminology and
>>therefore more naturally occuring like Peter's verbified cmap, it might
>>be worth pursuing. The term is also not saving much wording relative to
>>"creating a font table".
>
>Well, using the word holomap one could say the following.
>
>The font designer produced a font where the st ligature is holomapped to the
>U+FB06 code point.
>
>Given the definition of the verb holomap, that sentence conveys the meaning
>that the accessing of the glyph is not intended to be primarily by using the
>U+FB06 code point. How can the sentence be reworded using the wording
>"creating a font table" so as to convey the same meaning?
Since "mapping" is font-talk for assigning a glyph to a code point,
and ligatures are considered to be presentation forms by Unicode
cognoscenti, and presentation forms these days are deprecated-on-
arrival... the sentence above could be rephrased as:
The font designer produced a font where the st ligature
is mapped to the U+FB06 code point.
...and people familiar with the Standard would understand what was
going on. Holomap might seem to be more precise, yet anyone
unfamiliar with the Standard would perhaps be equally unfamiliar
with the concept of holomapping.
>> (Tex Texin)
>>I am willing to admit, that those of us (Americans?) that verbify, have
>>less of a need for new terms not based in existing noun roots. Perhaps
>>others that do not verbify, might find a term useful.
Verbify? Aren't we Americans disrepecting English here?
>> (Peter Constable)
>> We don't need a new word coined for this purpose. Those of us involved
>> in font development and the digital font industry have managed fine
>> without it thus far; I don't think any of us have developed any sudden
>> urge for a new way to express ourselves in technical discussions. And
>> if we did, I doubt "holomap" is what any of us would choose. We'd
>> probably do some verbing (so common among English speakers, it seems)
>> and say "cmap" as in "It is almost never necessary to cmap a ligature
>> glyph."
>>
How about "It is almost never necessary to map a ligature glyph"?
> What about Tamil? In Chapter 9 of the Unicode Specification is the
> following.
>
> quote
>
> It is important to emphasize that in a font that is capable of rendering
> Tamil, the set of glyphs is greater than the number of Tamil characters.
>
> end quote
This is also true of many non-Tamil scripts currently encoded in Unicode.
>
> If someone wishes to produce a display of Tamil text in a program such as
> Microsoft WordPad upon a Windows 98 platform using an advanced format font
> which contains all of the necessary ligature characters, would it be
> necessary, in order to get the job done, to have a font where the ligature
> glyphs are holomapped?
Yes. But, keeping in mind that the resulting display isn't Unicode,
it is a kludge, it isn't searchable, can't really be indexed, and the
best way to exchange such a file with another person is to make
a screen-shot and transmit it as a graphic.
> I find it strange that the Unicode Standard does not provide code points for
> the ligature characters so that holomappings for those ligature characters
> could be provided in the fonts. Perhaps I am missing something here, in
> which case I would be pleased to learn, yet it does seem to me at present to
> be the case that for some applications holomappings of those ligature glyphs
> would be useful.
The operative phrase above is "at present". The nice thing about
temporary solutions is that they do solve problems, the sad thing
is that they are ephemeral.
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Aug 05 2002 - 03:54:14 EDT