Re: IS UNICODE a STANDRAD

From: mpsuzuki@hiroshima-u.ac.jp
Date: Tue Jun 01 2010 - 10:43:07 CDT

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    Hi,

    I think ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode standards are basically
    designed to be independent with specific font & rendering
    technology, although sometimes specific font formats (like
    OpenType) are mentioned in the discussion about the possibility
    of the implementation for the proposed encoding mechanism.

    In addition, OpenType is one of the most popular font format
    to implement the complex text rendering for Unicode, and now
    it is standardized as ISO/IEC 14496-22, but its language/script
    dependent part is not a part of ISO. The specification is
    published by Microsoft, and it is free for the developers
    to follow it (to use Microsoft's Unicode rendering system)
    or to create their own specification to use their own rendering
    system.

    On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 07:57:33 -0700
    "V. M. Kumaraswamy" <ekavivmk@gmail.com> wrote:

    >Some font vendors say and publish on their website that their fonts are
    >Unicode fonts.

    Yes, but... do you want Unicode Consortium to prohibit to
    use "Unicode" in the opaque advertisement phrases?

    In CJK area, some font vendors call their new products as
    Unicode fonts, because their legacy products supported legacy
    encodings (e.g. Shift-JIS, GB2312/GBK, Big5, Wansung etc).
    Some consumers think they are deceived because they wanted
    to buy a font supporting all CJK Ideographs in latest Unicode
    but the characters in the font are almost same with those
    covered by legacy encodings.

    >Some of these fonts are developed by stealing GLYPHS of some similar fonts
    >whcih were available on the website. [that is: IPR stolen fonts]

    I'm not sure what you mean here... What you call "Unicode" font
    is a font including the glyphs scanned from the book "Unicode
    Standard"?

    Regards,
    mpsuzuki

    >On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:11 AM, Doug Ewell <doug@ewellic.org> wrote:
    >
    >> V. M. Kumaraswamy wrote:
    >>
    >> The Unicode Consortium is the publisher of The Unicode Standard as well
    >>>> as several other technical standards.
    >>>>
    >>>
    >>> So Unicode Consortium publishes standards for fonts ?
    >>> The Unicode Standrad is for fonts that are used in different countries ?
    >>>
    >>
    >> No, Asmus did not say that the Unicode Standard is a font standard. It is
    >> not. It is a character standard, which is a different thing because the
    >> identity of a character is not the same as the images of that character as
    >> displayed in any given font.
    >>
    >> The Unicode Consortium publishes charts showing representative examples of
    >> what each character looks like, for purposes of identifying the characters.
    >> The exact images are not normative, nor are the fonts used to generate the
    >> charts.
    >>
    >> The Unicode Standard especially does not specify anything about "fonts that
    >> are used in different countries." Font vendors, or countries if they are
    >> the ones who dictate what fonts may be used, may choose any fonts they like.
    >>
    >> --
    >> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
    >>
    >>
    >



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