Re: ct, fj and blackletter ligatures

From: Thomas Lotze (thomas.lotze@uni-jena.de)
Date: Wed Nov 06 2002 - 09:29:28 EST

  • Next message: Dominikus Scherkl: "RE: ct, fj and blackletter ligatures"

    William Overington wrote:

    > Also, perhaps there could be a method for asking a font to
    > please display all its ZWJ sequences and their results.
    [...]
    > Now it might be that some advanced font formats can do such things, I
    > do not know at present.
    [...]
    > Also, perhaps some method of asking a font to declare a
    > list of the code points for which it has a specific glyph would be
    > helpful. Again, perhaps some advanced font formats have these
    > abilities, I do not know at present.

    A font is not a program that executes machine code. A font is data, and
    a program only in the sense that, e.g, a PostScript font contains data
    in the PostScript programming language. Hence, a font can't 'do' this,
    only an application using the font can. Such an application will extract
    information it is interested in from the font, and do with it as its
    purpose commands. A font viewer application might display to the user
    tables of all glyphs, ligatures, and variations; the information (at
    least that about the total glyphs) is there in the font by definition.

    Similarly, it's a matter of the rendering engine to notify the
    application that requested the rendition (and thereby the user) that it
    didn't find all the glyphs it was looking for in the font. Maybe neither
    Unicode nor the font format specifications require such a behaviour, but
    one could of course write a rendering engine that exhibits it, whatever
    fonts it works on.

    Cheers, Thomas

    -- 
    Thomas Lotze
    thomas.lotze at gmx.net                      http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
    


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