From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Thu Jul 07 2005 - 01:47:06 CDT
Richard Wordingham wrote:
> The Latin alphabet precedent is not promising - diacritics combine badly
> in many fonts. There is a technical note on how to display them
> (http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn2/), but it didn't seem to me that it
> could be implemented in OpenType other than possibly by massive tables.
> I may be wrong, but it looks as though it may be extremely laborious to
> position Hebrew holam properly on all Latin consonants.
Aside from the problem of not knowing what would constitute 'proper' holam positioning on
a Latin consonant, I don't think there is any problem in this at all. Generally speaking,
one needs only two anchor attachments for Latin letters -- one above and one below -- and
then one anchor on each of the above and below marks if one wants to support mark-to-mark
positioning. There are some language specific variations, but in general it is not very
complex. It is something of a new area for most font developers, with limited tool support
-- not to mention application support --, and adding combining mark positioning to a large
library of existing fonts would be daunting for any foundry, but it isn't a hugely
laborious undertaking as an aspect of new font development.
I'm afraid that I have not followed all of this discussion, so I'm a little hazy about
just what is being debated in terms of Arabic encoding. Mete Kural made some reference to
a scholarly need for generative marks in Arabic, though, and I agree with this. It seems
to me that, entirely independently of the Arabic encoding used for typical language
processing, it would be desirable to have in Unicode a set of dotless archigraphemes (to
use Tom Milo's phrase) and appropriate generative marks to be able to encode the text of
Arabic manuscripts in a way that accurately reflects the writing conventions of the script
in the early period.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Currently reading: Truth and tolerance, by Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was War (revised edition), by Gwynne Dyer God's secret agents, by Alice Hogge
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