From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 17:17:34 EST
At 14:56 10/29/2002, starner@okstate.edu wrote:
>Is it complaint with Unicode to have a font where a-umlaut has a glyph of
>a with e above? What about a glyph of a-macron (e.g. a handwriting font
>for someone who writes a-umlaut that way)?
Yes, I would say that it is compliant with Unicode because there is
absolutely nothing in the Unicode Standard to say that it is non-compliant.
I have seen German display types in which the umlaut is indicated by a
miniature uppercase E *inside* the uppercase O. The point is that the small
e is an accepted traditional German convention for indicating an umlaut,
and any recognisable glyph variant of that convention fits the cognitive
model for many competent readers reading German. The example of a
handwriting font in which the umlaut is represented by something that looks
like a macron, or a tilde, or a duckbilled platypus, should be judged by
the same criteria: does the reader recognise the glyph as representing a
vowel with umlaut? If so, it is a perfectly valid glyph representation of
the umlaut character. It is, of course, a perfectly valid response to a
typeface design to say 'I don't want to use this font because it has a
weird umlaut', but it is equally valid for a typeface to have a weird
umlaut; it may limit the popularity of the typeface, but so might the shape
of the lowercase f or the curl of the tail of the Q, but would you say that
these forms need to be a certain way to be valid or compliant? Although the
line between glyph variants that are recognised by readers as valid
representations of characters and those that are not is difficult to
define, in practice readers are capable of making these decisions (and even
of recognising, accepting or learning new forms that they have not
encountered before): it is a bit like the distinction between pornography
and erotica, which is hard to define but which magistrates and juries
regularly decide on with confidence, competence and consensus.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
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