From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Thu May 27 2004 - 22:02:38 CDT
"Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com> writes:
> > From: D. Starner [mailto:shalesller@writeme.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, May 27, 2004 5:16 PM
>
> [David replied to me off-list, but as there's nothing particularly
> private or controversial, I'm taking the liberty to respond on list, as
> it seems relevant for the thread.]
My fault.
> > * A comparable discussion could appear involving Fraktur and Latin
> characters
> > and Chao and Chang.
>
> I agree, but only somewhat. I think those situations are probably not as
> representative of the casual-, non-specialist-user scenario, and that in
> that case Sally and Latisha are probably more likely to be paying close
> attention to the fonts being used. Even for the non-specialist
> situation, in a Fraktur/Antigua case (the Chao vs Chang is definitely
> out at least for *non-Asian* non-specialists), Sally is telling Latisha,
> "Make sure it shows up with those dark, old-English-looking characters",
That was the point of Chao vs. Chang. Surely there's some group of students
that might need to display Fraktur characters in a school report on writing
who aren't readily familiar with the normal Latin script.
> > * Sally probably won't have a Phoenician font, so this fails
> > no matter what Unicode decides.
>
> Well, if Phoenician is to be encoded in the 05xx block, you're right. If
> it's encoded separately and platform or word-processor vendors bundle
> fonts that provide coverage for various ranges of Unicode, then she very
> well may have a Phoenician font.
I'm not familar with fonts for most of the Plane 1 characters, except for
Code2001. I imagine there are commerical fonts for many Plane 1 scripts, but
I doubt they'll show in Windows or MacOS in the near future.
> > * If they did use a Phoencian font, they could still be surprised
> mid-presentation
> > when they discover the school's computers don't have a Phoenician font
> installed.
>
> Certainly true; but that is an independent cause that could just as well
> be used to argue for not encoding any new script. You might as well say
> because the school's computer didn't have Arabic fonts there was no
> reason to encode Arabic. So, I think it's not a relevant
> counter-argument.
The school's computer quite possibly doesn't have Arabic, and that it is a
good reason not to encode Arabic _for Sally and Latisha's sake._
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