Re: In defense of Plane 14 language tags (long)

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Mon Nov 04 2002 - 13:23:29 EST

  • Next message: Otto Stolz: "Re: In defense of Plane 14 language tags (long)"

    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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