From: Thomas Lotze (thomas.lotze@uni-jena.de)
Date: Fri Nov 08 2002 - 11:37:39 EST
Hi,
as I've learnt in the recent thread about ligatures, Unicode does not
encode glyphs but characters. Ligatures and special glyphs to be used
for a character at the end of a word are considered presentation forms
and won't be encoded or at least deprecated.
Why is the long form of the small latin letter s considered a character
in its own right? (It has UV 017F and is not deprecated, according to
the glyph tables.)
At least the way the two s are used in german, they seem to act like a
classical pair of representation forms of one single character: if the
long s is present in the font, it is used by default except at the end
of a word or part of a compound word (and maybe some other cases like
double s?). If it is not present, a round s is used everywhere. To me,
is seems logical to have a round s at UV 0073 in fonts that have only
one s shape, a long s at UV0073 in fonts that have both, and to use the
round s as an alternate in the latter case.
Moreover, the name "long s" seems to be more descriptive of the glyph,
not the character. "Variant s" or "alternate s" would be better, but
I'm aware that this cannot be changed anymore.
I hope this is not just another stupid question; at least the long s is
not mentioned in the FAQ.
Cheers, Thomas
-- Thomas Lotze thomas.lotze@gmx.net http://www.thomas-lotze.de/
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