From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Jul 25 2007 - 02:28:40 CDT
Aiet Kolkhi wrote:
> To put it short, this is somewhat incorrect to comprare "Mtavruli"
> (capital) style of contemporary Georgian alphabet (Mkhedruli) to small
> caps font style. And it is definitely wrong to look for solutions in
> CSS and other typographical directions, as the two "styles" or scripts
> (consider as you like) are different in shape and changing size of the
> characters would not give us Mtavruli style from Mkedruli script, nor
> the other way around.
>
> The only solution enabling users to use Georgian Mtavruli style
> together with Georgian contemporary Mkhedruli alphabet would be to add
> Georgian Mtavruli style range to Unicode (or to apply fonts on
> different parts of the text, one font having Georgian Mkhedruli
> characters in 10D0-10FF range and the other using Mtavruli style of
> Georgian Mkedruli character in the same 10D0-10FF range).
Really no. The Mkhedruli style is NOT different from the Mtavruli style your
described at the text encoding level. This is purely a stylistic variant,
and this is demonstrated by the fact that you want it only for titles, not
for normal texts (note that even with Latin/Greek/Cyrilic, the small-caps
variant style is sometimes used to present some long paragraph texts, it is
used as an emphasis stylistic feature and DOES NOT require reenconging these
scripts).
We have seen that there even exists different styles for "small-caps" in
Latin. How many variants of Latin would then we need to reencode in Unicode?
Really you are going the wrong way and want to introduce complexity in a
much simpler problem. All what you have described really demonstrates that
this is still the normal Modern Georgian script (even if the default
"Mkhedruli" style is just ONE of its presentation forms).
Nobody has suggested you to tweak the texts using things like the mostly
abandonned usage of the Old Monumental Asomtavruli letters from the
bicameral Old Georgian script to make the unicameral modern Georgian script
into a bicameral one: even within titles, your description really suggests
that Mkhedruli titles are remaining unicameral. In other words this is still
the same Modern Georgian script, and they should still be encoded using
Mkhedruli letters (in the same 10D0-10FF range).
You have even suggested that this was like having Latin without bold; but
remember also that bold variants of Latin are not mandatorily supported in
browsers, and so they may occasionnaly appear exactly like non bold texts
(think about text console-based browsers like Links: bold is most often not
supported, but may eventually be rendered by color adjustment; but it will
not be rendered on monochrome displays, or with Braille readers).
If you really want to make sure that titling gets correct emphasis from the
rest of the text in all situations, you need to play with several stylistic
alternatives combined with other layout features (including the possible use
of punctuation, bullets, extra spaces, leading numbering of titles...)
Given that you wanted that for usages on the web (for browsers) using style
really makes sense. For typesetted documented (like PDFs, newspapers,
books...), using multiple fonts is really not a problem, because you the
author know exactly how the text will be rendered and you can use every
possible stylistic feature and as many fonts as wantedto produce the desired
effects.
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