From: philip chastney (philip_chastney@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Nov 20 2008 - 02:26:34 CST
--- On Wed, 19/11/08, Mark Davis <mark@macchiato.com> wrote:
> From: Mark Davis <mark@macchiato.com>
> Subject: Re: Why people still want to encode precomposed letters
> To: "Andrew West" <andrewcwest@gmail.com>
> Cc: "Kenneth Whistler" <kenw@sybase.com>, unicode@unicode.org
> Date: Wednesday, 19 November, 2008, 5:51 PM
>
> As to the matter at hand, there is not complete agreement on the goal of the named
> sequences. However, specifically, we aren't planning to add named sequences for every
> possible sequence that someone could reasonably want to appear with an optimal
> presentation* in fonts. For example, someone mentioned that it is appropriate to have an
> uppercase delta with a variety of combining marks for use in mathematics, but that is not
> appropriate for named sequences.
it's not clear why you mention uppercase delta here -- mathematicians are quite prodigal in their use of marks, for instance
x-dot (U+1e8b) can mean the first differential (with respect to time, typically)
x-double-dot (U+1e8d) can mean the second differential (w.r.t time)
x-bar (x-macron) the mean value of x
x-hat (x-circumflex) the estimated value of x
and these marks can appear on any letter (104 more named sequences?), upper or lower case (another 104 named sequences?)
if said mathematician wants to distinguish sample measures from population measures, he will want accented Greek letters as well (the sample mean can be used as an estimate of the population mean, and so we have the quantity mu-hat (which may or may not display as μ̂) -- !--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Tahoma;
panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4;
mso-font-charset:0;
mso-generic-font-family:swiss;
mso-font-pitch:variable;
mso-font-signature:1627421319 -2147483648 8 0 66047 0;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{mso-style-parent:"";
margin:0pt;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";}
@page Section1
{size:595.3pt 841.9pt;
margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;
mso-header-margin:35.4pt;
mso-footer-margin:35.4pt;
mso-paper-source:0;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
so, a few more named sequences and you're done
.... unless, of course, the mathematician happens to be Russian
̂
> So one should not be viewing named sequences as *the* source for font developers
> to see which sequences they should account for in their fonts.
quite so -- the best you can hope for is a list of known sequences found in natural languages (explicitly excluding mathematical usage)
that would still be an asset -- you could, for instance, say "we will add "o-barred macron" to the list of named sequences", and it might be a long time before it appeared in a font, but at least the rest of the world is aware of the requirement
> What users want is for the accent to appear in the right location. Whether this is done
> by mapping the sequence to a precomposed glyph, or by using anchor points, is an
> issue for the font designer.
the first issue for the font designer is how known sequences are going to be provided for
the second issue for the font designer is whether to tackle the open-ended problem of other possible sequences, which can only be done using anchor points
but there comes a time when you have to say, "this is no longer base+mark, this needs markup" -- for instance, actuaries can do things to the letter 'a' that you wouldn't want to have to explain to your mother
regards . . . /phil
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