From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 21:03:43 EST
Thanks for taking the time to prepare a detailed response, John (Jenkins).
You know I'm only hammering in the hope that it will have some effect,
perhaps with those people 'who actually call the shots'.
It is frustrating as a font developer to now be able to do some incredibly
clever things relatively easily for complex scripts on Windows, and still
be faced with mort, morx and state tables on the Mac side, especially when
we're trying to support scholars and others with advanced needs. To date,
Biblical Hebrew is the most difficult piece of OT development I've had to
do -- getting the nikud and teamin positioning to interract properly is
very fiddly, especially since I need to handle some non-standard elements
like right-positioned meteg in the Biblia Hebraici Stuttgartensia text --,
and I'm pretty sure that I would have to hire a telephone exchange
programmer (or Dave Opstad) to achieve the same results in AAT. I think
I've always been very fair in pointing out the processing advantages of
GX/AAT -- and the advantage of this model for scripts not yet supported in
external shaping engines like Uniscribe --, even as I curse the development
obstacles and question the need for so complex a technology for 95% of the
world's text and typography needs. But I end up feeling sorry for people
who have invested in Macs when they're left on the sidelines as Microsoft
and even Adobe stream past them on the complex script front, with more and
better application and font support. I feel particularly for scholarly
users, many of whom became Mac users as a result of Apple's effective
marketing in the educational field, and who now have what I have to
consider a second class platform for the kind of work that they need to do
(and increasingly likely to become a third class platform as FreeType and
ICU improve OT support).
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
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Mar 06 2003 - 21:54:47 EST