Re: Klingon

From: Mark E. Shoulson (mark@kli.org)
Date: Thu Jan 15 2004 - 12:59:14 EST

  • Next message: Mark E. Shoulson: "Re: ConScript"

    No, not because the font uses the PUA. Non-conformant because the font
    does *NOT* use the PUA. Lawrence Schoen (who made the font) put the
    Klingon letters as used for tlhIngan-Hol on the uppercase latin letters
    (with some modifications to deal with the digraph and trigraph letters,
    and the two q's), and an older "Klingon alphabet" which was never mapped
    to the sounds of tlhIngan Hol on the lowercase letters, the two versions
    of the numbers on 0-9 and their keyboard-shifted versions respectively,
    and various other symbols on period, comma, etc. He made the font
    before Unicode was really on the scene much, and even now is
    insufficiently geeky to grok Unicode; he was making a "trick font."

    It's incredibly useful, Philippe, to have some inkling of what you're
    talking about before you answer.

    ~mark

    On 01/15/04 10:46, Philippe Verdy wrote:

    >From: Chris Jacobs
    >
    >
    >>WHY THEN DISTRIBUTES THE KLI SUCH A BLATANTLY UNCONFORMANT FONT?
    >>
    >>
    >
    >You could have said that without vociferating so loudly. (Against the
    >etiquette, no?)
    >
    >What is non conforming? The fact that the font uses PUAs? It's not illegal,
    >just not guaranteed to be interoperable for the long term across all
    >conforming hosts which may have their own PUA conventions.
    >So it is used by mutual private agreement between Klingon users, which
    >accept the fact that their texts encoded with PUAs may not be readable by
    >everyone as it requires a specific font... This means that these texts are
    >tightly bound to that font and that this font is to be used within rich-text
    >documents (HTML, Word, etc...) or can be used to prepare precomposed
    >documents like PDFs...
    >
    >
    >



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