From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Wed Dec 03 2003 - 23:33:09 EST
John Hudson scripsit:
> Both kinds of information may be necessary, depending on the writing
> system (particular application of a particular script to a particular
> language). Encoding a particular glyph as U+00431 in a font cmap table is
> script-specific information; a glyph substitution lookup that replaces
> that glyph with a different one when the language is Serbian is
> language-specific information.
And in particular, whether a given Indic ligature is required, permitted,
or forbidden within a particular script depends on the language being
written. This is also true in a small way even in Latin: the fi-ligature
is forbidden in Turkish for practical reasons, and (I have heard) in
Portuguese for reasons of tradition.
> Note, however, that not everything one may want to happen in a font is
> neatly divisible into script and language. There may be distinct
> typographic traditions in the setting of the same language. Catering for
> these in architectures that are nominally limited to script and language
> distinctions is very tricky.
Indeed. German is the obvious example.
-- John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> www.ccil.org/~cowan www.reutershealth.com Micropayment advocates mistakenly believe that efficient allocation of resources is the purpose of markets. Efficiency is a byproduct of market systems, not their goal. The reasons markets work are not because users have embraced efficiency but because markets are the best place to allow users to maximize their preferences, and very often their preferences are not for conservation of cheap resources. --Clay Shirkey
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