RE: Variant Glyph Display

From: Chris Pratley (chrispr@exchange.microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2003 - 21:07:14 EDT

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    Christian,

    Peter was asking for a global switch that changed behavior. There's
    nothing wrong with a doc-level or run-level switch. We implemented a
    run-level switch in Word2002.

    Chris

    -----Original Message-----
    From: Christian Wittern [mailto:wittern@kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp]
    Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 11:50 PM
    To: Chris Pratley
    Cc: Peter_Constable@sil.org; Michael (michka) Kaplan;
    unicode@unicode.org; unicode-bounce@unicode.org
    Subject: Re: Variant Glyph Display

    Chris,

    "Chris Pratley" <chrispr@exchange.microsoft.com> writes:

    > Peter,
    >
    > We generally try not to have options that equate to "fail to correctly
    > interpret data I might receive from another user". If we have that,
    then
    > part of the world starts creating docs that other parts of the world
    > can't render or layout correctly, and we've spent the last 10 years
    > trying to get away from that.

    This is certainly a laudable intent. But how would Peter's suggestion
    result in that? He wrote:

    >
    > I think this is quite unlike overingtonian ideas of PUA usage: such
    >ideas propose complex semantics for PUA characters and, more to the
    >point, suggest that there should be common understanding of those
    >semantics, or that there should be mechanisms (usually of a sort that
    >doesn't use commonly implemented protocols like XML) for
    >interchanging information about those semantics. What is happening
    >here is that a particular widely-used product assumes a semantics for
    >certain PUA codepoints that serve the needs of a specific (albeit
    >significant) regional market, and that I have suggested that it would
    >be helpful to users in other regions if those assumptions could be
    >overridden.

    This is talking about the associated semantics of PUA characters,
    things like "EastAsianWidth", which are assumed for PUA ranges.
    Changing that assumption (and recording this in the document) would in
    now way make it impossible to render correctly. Of course you would
    need the PUA font, but that is true anyway, no matter what you do with
    the semantics.

    All the best,

    Christian

    -- 
     Christian Wittern 
     Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
     47 Higashiogura-cho, Kitashirakawa, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8265, JAPAN
    


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