From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2004 - 17:23:32 EST
From: "Michael Everson" <everson@evertype.com>
> The glyphs are not normative.
I thought that you were exactly promoting the reverse. That's why I wanted
to moderate things about glyphs. But Unicode still states that they are
"representative", and it publishes them as they are necessary for correct
identification of character identities.
But if you want to insist more with your position, why not simply dropping
completely all glyphs from the Unicode standard? I'm sure many people would
not be happy, because the character identity would only be demonstrated by
the normative properties, which include their often misleading assigned
names...
I maintain that if you remove the glyph shown for latin letter oi
(considered only as informative and not mandatory in any of its aspects),
and just keep its normative name, then many people will think that the
encoded character really represents a letter named or pronounced "oi". Which
is completely wrong in our case. But would allow people to use the assigned
code point to represent the L-shaped character "i with lower-right hook"...
Can't you admit the problem here with a so extreme position? You have here a
position which is much more modulated in the published Unicode standard,
which states that the published "representative" glyphs are representative,
which means that at least the exhibited glyph can be safely used in ALL
cases (yes, even if actual glyphs often have contextual forms, sometimes
mandatory in some scripts or languages) to represent the character (also
even if other glyphs are possible) without causing interpretation/reading
problems in the rendered text.
The problem we were discussing here is that only the informative and
non-normative properties are giving the appropriate identity of the encoded
letters, but NONE of the existing normative properties... So I really give
some credits to these glyphs (and ISO/IEC 10646 too... as it just encodes
repertoires of characters for the need of allowing unambiguous conversion of
many legacy encodings into a common and unified repertoire). I did not say
that these glyphs are mandatory for conformance, but the exact way these
variations in glyphs are allowed is not described. (meaning that font
designers must be extremely prudent before creating variants of these
glyphs, as it may produce confusive texts in some tricky cases or with some
languages for which the font design was not tested).
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