Re: Glyphs for German quotation marks

From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Fri Jun 16 2006 - 15:31:59 CDT

  • Next message: John Hudson: "Re: Glyphs for German quotation marks"

    Andreas Prilop wrote:

    > Never! Even in Futura
    > http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_039.html
    > the apostrophe is wider at the top than at the bottom.

    Which fonts, note, do not support U+201B. Nor, to my knowledge, do any fonts available
    from Adobe, not even the most recent larger OpenType fonts.

    >>What happens if they want to switch fonts?
    >>Should they have to run search and replace functions on their document?

    > That's what happens now all the time in German texts with
    > Courier [New] and Verdana! The German Usenet and German web pages
    > are full of complaints about this since many years! That's how
    > this thread started!

    Yes, and to solve the German problem you want to force everyone else to perform this kind
    of text encoding hacks. This is not a solution. This is a glyph design problem and should
    be resolved at the glyph level. This means either redesigning the quote glyphs in the
    problem fonts so that they are clearly differntiated at small sizes and low resolutions
    without needing to rely on slant angle, or providing language-specific glyph variants.

    By the way, we already do the latter for the Sindhi comma, which has the same encoding as
    the Arabic comma but is a mirrored form of the Latin comma. There is neither a need nor a
    desire for separate encoding for these glyph variants.

    John Hudson

    -- 
    Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
    Vancouver, BC         john@tiro.ca
    I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget
    that words are the daughters of earth, and that things
    are the sons of heaven.  - Samuel Johnson
    


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