From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Thu Oct 24 2002 - 13:26:17 EDT
Kent Karlsson wrote:
> And it is easy for Joe User to make a simple (visual...)
> substitution cipher by just swiching to a font with the
> glyphs for letters (etc.) permuted. Sure! I think it
> would be a bad idea to call it a "Unicode font" though...
> (That it technically may have a "unicode cmap" is beside
> my point.)
The only meaning that I can attach to the expression "Unicode font" is a
pan-Unicode font: a font which covers all the scripts in Unicode.
If this is what you mean, then displaying "ä" as an "a^e" is clearly not a
good idea. But neither choosing Fraktur glyphs would be a good idea! How can
you have Fraktur IPA!? Fraktur Pinyin!? Fraktur Devanagari!? Fraktur
Arabic!? In general, no noticeable difference from the glyphs used on the
Unicode book would be a good idea for a pan-Unicode font.
But if by "Unicode font" you just mean a font which is compliant with the
Unicode standard, but only supports one or more of the scripts, then *any*
font having a unicode cmap is a Unicode font. And also many fonts *not*
having a Unicode cmap are, provided that something inside or outside the
font knows how to pick up the right glyphs.
In this sense, what is or is not appropriate depends on the font's style and
targeted usages and languages: there are fonts which don't have dots over
"i" and "j"; fonts where U+0059 and U+03A5 look different; fonts where
U+0061, U+0251, U+03B1 and U+FF41 look identical; fonts where capital and
small letters look identical...
Why can't there be a Fraktur font where "ä" and "a^e" look identical, if
this is appropriate for that typographical style and for the usages and
languages intended for the font?
Ciao.
Marco
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