Re: Variant Glyph Display

From: jameskass@att.net
Date: Thu Apr 10 2003 - 16:19:40 EDT

  • Next message: Michael Everson: "Re: Ancient Greek (symbols versus letters and duplicate letters)"

    .
    With Chris Harvey's permission, his off-list response is being forwarded
    to the list.

    Pointers to character proposal instructions have already been sent to
    Chris off-list.
    .
    > Hi, ᑖᓂᓯ ᐁᑿ!
    >
    > Thanks for your emails.
    >
    > The font designer that I was using at the time (FontLab) showed that the
    > range after Syllabics was Undefined, so I thought that it would be ok to
    > use it. Originally, I had put all of the extra characters in the Private
    > Use zone, but Microsoft Word would always recognise these private zone
    > characters as Chinese or Korean, so putting them in the zone after
    > Syllabics seemed a workable solution at the time.
    >
    > However, when I learned that this zone was in fact designated for other
    > orthographies, I mentioned on the website that putting the extra characters
    > in Mongolian etc. was not permanent, and that once Open type could be used,
    > that this would be the best answer. When this happens, there will be no
    > need to have characters in other ranges, just the normal Syllabics range
    > plus language codes or non-spacing accents.
    >
    > I will be putting up the new font in a week or so (I hope), and completely
    > revamp the website. The new font has ALL of the extra glyphs in the
    > Private use zone. My goal was to get the Native languages on the internet
    > as soon as I could, and that there would definitively be some changes. I
    > know about many of the technical problems of my decision, and I am doing my
    > best to fix the problem.
    >
    > As for expanding Unicode to take account of the 'missing characters', I now
    > believe that Opentype can take care of most of this, although there are a
    > few symbols that ought to be uniquely encoded. I would be most interested
    > to make a proposal, and any advice on how to do this would be appreciated.
    >
    > I apologise to anyone who has used the font expecting it to perform in ways
    > it is clearly unable. I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions, my
    > purpose here is to make the font as useful as possible to everyone, and not
    > to by any means pigeon-hole Native language users.
    >
    > chris
    >

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