From: Peter_Constable@sil.org
Date: Mon May 05 2003 - 11:38:06 EDT
William Overington wrote on 05/05/2003 05:52:43 AM:
> I wonder if I could please put forward an idea that fontmakers might like
to
> consider please.
Once you're finished wondering, feel free to present your suggestion to the
font makers on the list. And I wonder if I may please suggest that one
might consider avoiding the practice of writing using unnecessary
periphrasis please. :-)
> Whilst recognizing that adding a lot of extra accented
> characters for languages with other-than-large user populations to a font
> may not be the way to go for most fonts, how about adding four or five so
> that each font supports a language with an other-than-large user
population?
> One font might support one language, another font another language.
What? A type designer is going to pick some arbitrary four or five extra
accented characters to support in addition to (say) Windows cp1252? And
we'll see what small-population languages any given font happens to
support? So, perhaps if they're lucky the approx. 200,000 speakers of
Mbandja (say), having looked at 389 fonts, will finally find a font
somewhat akin to Brush Script MT that happens to support their orthography?
And the benefit to either the type designer or the user community is?
Some of us who are really working in a serious way with small-population
language communities are taking a rather different approach toward this:
provide comprehensive coverage of Latin characters. See
http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/gentium/ for one example.
- Peter
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
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