From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Mar 22 2006 - 21:47:17 CST
From: "James Kass" <jameskass@att.net>
> As an English speaker who recalls converting notebooks and 3x5 cards
> to data in those old fixed-pitch text computers, I'd accept the limitation
> rather than have no ability at all to compute in my own language.
I would also accept to use a typewriter style font for French that isaonly able to render "É" (capital E with acute) as two separate glyphs (E, then acute over a dotted circle), or as a poor typography of E with a acute positioned like if it was a lowercase letter, so that the acute accent intersects with the upper arm.
That's what is happening anyway with lots of diacritics applied to latin letters (for example dot below african consonnants which is often incorrectly centered below the previous letter in most current fonts, including OpenType ones, only because there's no positioning rule for such pair in the OT tables) ; users would still prefer having correct typography, but it's more important to be able to render such diacritic with a reasonable "best-effort" solution, rather than just displaying a box for a missing glyph for the diacritic.
It would of course be better if the font had smarter positioning rules by anotating the glyphs for base letters with enough information to position any diacritic with it (including diacritics currently not implemented in that font but only found in another unspecified one). For this to work, fonts should avoid mapping inimplemented characters to the internal box that denotes a missing glyph, or it should map them only to the conventional glyph ID that denotes a missing glyph (so that the renderer knows that this font mapping is replacable using other fallback fonts when available).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Mar 22 2006 - 21:53:44 CST