From: Thomas Lotze (thomas.lotze@uni-jena.de)
Date: Thu Nov 07 2002 - 13:43:22 EST
On Thu, 7 Nov 2002 10:40:48 -0600
Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
> You're assuming there is a problem. If I send you a document and I
> wanted it to display in Comic Sans but you don't have that font on
> your system, so you end up seeing it in, say, Arial, does that merit a
> dialog box?
Depends. For a home user who doesn't care about fonts, it doesn't. For
someone who cares, it does. If I am interested in some information, I
don't like if I can't get it just because someone couldn't imagine it
was a problem.
> As for providing a
> notification dialog to say that the text contains < c, ZWJ, t > but
> that the font doesn't support it, there are no existing mechanisms to
> support that at present,
I don't understand this. Since a font doesn't "do" anything, but
software using the font does, one could write a rendering engine which
gives feedback about how well it could complete its job, and a
typesetting application might elect to make use of that feedback and
provide a notification dialog or whatever. BTW, as the information about
available glyphs in a font is independent of character encoding, I don't
see the relevance of this whole discussion to this list.
> but it hasn't been demonstrated that there really is any
> need, and I really don't expect vendors will be hearing too many
> complaints from users.
That's no reason. Just because many people don't need a feature, or
maybe just don't care enough to complain, doesn't mean it shouldn't be
provided for those who do need it.
I could well imagine that in a typesetting application, it would make
sense to be informed on whether a certain typographic feature can or
cannot be applied. Carefully checking a long document for whether, e.g.,
a certain pair of glyphs does form a ligature where it is supposed to is
tedious and error-prone if done by a human, but such routine tasks are
what computers are good at.
Cheers, Thomas
-- Thomas Lotze thomas.lotze@gmx.net http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
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