From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Sep 15 2004 - 01:15:56 CDT
At 05:21 PM 9/14/2004, Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin wrote:
>On 2004.09.14, 17:06, Jörg Knappen <knappen@uni-mainz.de> wrote:
>
> > My classic for this situation is the german -burg abbreviature often
> > seen in cartography: It is -bg. with breve between b and g.
>
>Why not U+0062 U+035D U+0067 ? I guess that the typical presentation
>of this convention uses a regular breve, not a "double width" one, but
>wouldn't this be just a glyph issue?
No - to the person encoding the text, its a text representation problem.
The flip answer, "it's just a glyph issue" means that there is some other
technology whose task it is to carry the intent of the user. There are many
situations where such technology and the attendant protocols are well
established. For example, if someone wants to change the font color of a
word, there is style markup to do that, and some marked up (or 'rich') text
format is the correct choice.
For certain scripts (as well as certain notational systems) the layout
system must implement internally some specialized rules for glyph selection
and formatting. In the context of such scripts or systems, one can often
rely on the existence, or anticipated existence of technology implementing
such rules when pushing off a problem as a 'glyph issue'.
Note that such technologies are limited to *implicit* rules and may need
additional character codes for special characters to disambiguate some
contexts (for example, RLM for bidi, ZWNJ for joining, SHY for hyphenation,
etc.).
Sometimes, glyph selection means, simply, font selection. Font selection is
very appropriate in two situations. One, when the user wants to change the
appearance of all instances of a given character, or even all instances of
all characters, in a text, or some extended run of text. The other is when
users use specialized fonts for particular symbols; either to get alternate
representation (such as a different set of glyphs for the astrological
symbols), or to use font technology for symbols for which Unicode does not
provide a semantic encoding (e.g. Webdings).
However, there are some scenarios that do not fit well with explicit font
selection and at the same time are not currently covered by existing (or
anticipated) layout systems, nor by existing or anticipated conventions for
markup. The example given is a case in point.
(neither markup, nor font switchin is currently an effective solution for
placing a regular sized accent "between" two letters - for double wide
accents we do have solutions in the encoding).
In cases like that it does not help to declare that an issue is a 'glyph
issue'. That doesn't solve the problem, but merely pushes it around. It
would be much more helpful to at least acknowledge that neither encoding,
nor alternate technologies can solve the problem as stated. That would
allow us to start the search for the correct place in the character glyph
model...
A./
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