From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Thu Apr 10 2003 - 12:16:44 EDT
James Kass told us...
> Quoting from,
> http://www.languagegeek.com/syllabics/unicodeproblems.html
> (quote)
> What does this all mean? Not much to the typical user, who is
> unlikely to use letters from alphabets such as Ancient Celtic
> Ogham or Mongolian (where I have placed these special characters).
> (end quote)
> The main page for the fonts section is:
> http://www.languagegeek.com/syllabics/syllabicfonts.html
Oh, dear. That's blatantly non-conformant. Why not use the PUA? Or even
just use different fonts for the different languages? Using the codepionts
for Ogham or Mongolian is really bad.
I'll step up here and protest this non-conformant development. While it is
gratifying to see the development of UCAS fonts and I admire that, this is
a beautiful example of what NOT to do: codepoint overloading. It is one
of the ugliest things that Unicode was designed to stamp out. This kind of
development dooms the font's user community to producing non-conformant
data which cannot be reliably interchanged with the outside world. It
cannot be reliably archived for future use by anyone who doesn't have that
font. It is a short-term proprietary solution that does the user community
a great long-term dis-service by further isolating them from the world
community, from standard software, and from standard archival practices.
Minority script users don't need further isolation and proprietary
solutions -- they already have enough problems without adding
non-conformant implementations to the heap.
I really hope this font isn't already in widespread use... And I hope the
developer doesn't expect the overloaded characters to behave properly for
UCAS -- after all, the "special characters" really are Mongolian or Ogham,
and will behave like Mongolian characters on any conformant system.
"Any-opinions-expressed-here-are-purely-my-own"ly,
Rick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Apr 10 2003 - 13:01:02 EDT