From: David Starner (starner@okstate.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 24 2002 - 01:46:58 EDT
On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 06:49:38PM -0400, David J. Perry wrote:
> > First, is it compliant with Unicode for an Antiqua font to use an s
> > glyph for ſ (U+017F)? It makes switching between Antiqua and Fraktur
> > fonts possible, and it is arguably the glyph given to the middle s
> > in modern Antiqua fonts.
>
> If you are sure that the font will only be used for printing German
> this might be OK as a stopgap.
Why? Yes, if you want to use a true long s, you're going to need a
different font. But I can see this paired with an old Antiqua font, too,
if you want to use it for an exact copy of the American Constitution or
something.
> However, even with German, here's the
> problem: if a user searched for a word containing -s at the end, and
> typed it using the s key, then it would not be matched (unless the
> search engine already knew that long s and s are equivalent).
You've got the long s and s reversed. In old printing, the s is the
letter that appears at the end. I don't see it as a problem; if you
typed in the long s, search for the long s. It might get confusing if
more general purpose fonts started doing this, but unless you have a
need to exactly reproduce the original document, you probably shouldn't
use the long s anyway.
> An
> OpenType font that is smart enough to substitute a long s glyph at the
> right spots is the much superior long-term solution.
There are two problems with this; one, German has had a number of
orthography changes, each time changing slightly when you're supposed to
use the long s (IIRC). Secondly, no matter what the convention, it
requires a dictionary lookup for various case; I'm not sure you can do
that in an OpenType font, and it's not something I'm sure I want a
renderer doing in the first place.
-- David Starner - starner@okstate.edu Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom-- A field where a thousand corpses lie. -- Stephen Crane, "War is Kind"
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