From: Mark Davis (mark.davis@jtcsv.com)
Date: Mon Oct 28 2002 - 21:29:47 EST
I'm pretty much in agreement with what you say, except the following:
> Of course, the term "Unicode font" is also often used to mean "a font
> that covers all, or nearly all, of Unicode."
I would consider a Unicode font to be one that met your other conditions,
aside from the repertoire. If I had a font that covered Latin, Greek and
Cyrillic and worked with Unicode strings, for example, I would still
consider that a Unicode font. I just wouldn't consider it a (pick your
adjective) full / complete Unicode font.
Mark
__________________________________
http://www.macchiato.com
► “Eppur si muove” ◄
----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>
To: "Unicode Mailing List" <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2002 17:37
Subject: Re: Character identities
> My USD 0.02, as someone who is neither a professional typographer nor a
> font designer (more than one, but not quite two, different things)...
>
> Discussions about the character-glyph model often mention the "essential
> characteristics" of a given character. For example, a Latin capital A
> can be bold, italic, script, sans-serif, etc., but it must always have
> that essential "A-ness" such that readers of (e.g.) English can identify
> it as an A instead of, say, an O or a 4 or a picture of a duck. (Mark
> Davis has a chart showing dozens of different A's in his "Unicode Myths"
> presentation.)
>
> Somewhere in between the obvious relationships (A = A, B ≠ A), we have
> the case pair A and a. They are not identical, but they are certainly
> more similar to each other than are A and B.
>
> It seems to me, as a non-font guy, that calling a font a "Unicode font"
> implies two things:
>
> 1. It must be based on Unicode code points. For True- and OpenType
> fonts, this implies a Unicode cmap; for other font technologies it
> implies some more-or-less equivalent mechanism. The point is that
> glyphs must be associated with Unicode code points (not necessarily
> 1-to-1, of course), not merely with an internal 8-bit table that can be
> mapped to Unicode only through some other piece of software.
>
> 2. The glyphs must reflect the "essential characteristics" of the
> Unicode character to which they are mapped. That means a capital A can
> be bold, italic, script, sans-serif, etc. A small a can also be
> small-caps (or even full-size caps), but I think this is the only
> controversial point.
>
> In a Unicode font, U+0041 cannot be mapped to a capital A with macron,
> as it is in Bookshelf Symbol 1; nor to a six-pointed star, as in
> Monotype Sorts; nor to a hand holding up two fingers, as in Wingdings.
> (But it can be mapped to a "notdef" glyph, if the font makes no claim to
> supporting U+0041.)
>
> U+0915 absolutely can have snow on it, or be bold or italic or whatever
> (or all of these), as long as a Devanagari reader would recognize its
> essential "ka-ness." It cannot look like a Latin A, nor for that matter
> can U+0041 look like a Devanagari ka.
>
> Font guys, do you agree with this?
>
> Of course, the term "Unicode font" is also often used to mean "a font
> that covers all, or nearly all, of Unicode." Font technologies
> generally don't even allow this, of course, and even by the standards of
> "nearly" we are still limiting ourselves to things like Bitstream
> Cyberbit, Arial Unicode MS, Code2000, Cardo, etc. Right or wrong, this
> is a commonly accepted meaning for "Unicode font."
>
> -Doug Ewell
> Fullerton, California
>
>
>
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