From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Sat Apr 17 2004 - 16:55:58 EDT
On 16/04/2004 21:15, John Hudson wrote:
> ...
> If the font were intended only for Greek, I would consider it, but it
> may not be practical in multiscript fonts. Even in a font intended
> only for Greek, though, I can't be sure that someone won't have a need
> for a genuine mid-dot.
>
>
This is a significant point. It is expected that fonts designed for
specific scripts also include the basic ASCII set. They can therefore be
used for writing English etc. But the punctuation marks do not fit for
English. Thus the Hebrew font Ezra SIL looks quite nice for English,
except that its commas look quite wrong because they are designed for
Hebrew.
I suppose it would be possible for a smart font to select different
glyphs based on the script of whatever characters precedes it, in the
absence of other language marking. But even that isn't necessarily what
is wanted. In a text which is mostly English, I often want lists of
Hebrew words separated by commas, and in that case I would prefer
English style commas. There are also bidi algorithm related issues here:
in fact the best resolution for Hebrew is probably to decide the comma
glyph on the basis of the bidi context, as LRM or similar needs to be
inserted before the commas in my list of Hebrew words to ensure that the
list runs in the correct direction.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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