From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 13:23:29 EST
At 10:21 11/4/2002, Otto Stolz wrote:
>A common Cyrillic example is the difference in the italic forms for,
>e. g., Russian and Serbian, cf. "Rendering Serbian italics" (used to
>be at <http://www.tiro.com/transfer/Serbian_Rendering.pdf> -- John,
>can we have it back?).
It's back.
I have not read through all Doug's arguments in favour of the Plane 14
language tags, but one comment I will make about the kind of glyph
preference represented by the Serbian example is that is not always neatly
expressible using natural language tags, since the preferences might
cultural or historical: identified with particular user communities,
sometimes distinct from the main body of language users, or with specific
periods. For this reason, the OpenType 'language system' tags are better
understood as typographic system tags, and it is not clear to me that it
would always be possible or desirable to link a particular OT typographic
tag to a particular Plane 14 language tag -- or, indeed, to any language
tag: there have been discussions on the OT list regarding the validity of
applying, e.g. a French typographic system tag to Greek text to produce
conventional French typography for classical texts as distinct from British
or German conventions. My view is that typographic system tagging of the
kind enabled in OT should be separately applied at a level above language
tagging. Language tagging is useful for determining sorting order,
dictionary support for spellchecking, etc.; typographic system tagging is
useful for determining how text should be displayed.
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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