From: Vincent Setterholm (vincent@logos.com)
Date: Wed Jun 30 2010 - 03:31:40 CDT
Hello, Mr. Kaplan. Good to hear from you; I've enjoyed your blog.
I'm having a hard time parsing your email. As Khaled and I have pointed out, the problem is not one of a lack of font development as the extra dotted circles show. For the case of Hebrew, in particular, the SBL Hebrew font already has attachment points to combine the various vowels and accent marks with 25CC and it combines those marks well on a space, too (A less-desirable workaround, but one which Uniscribe and Office supported at least at one point - maybe they still do, but which never worked in WPF).
Since I presume all that was obvious to you from reading the thread, I feel like the salient part of your post must be "when no one put in the effort for the specific case" - but I've been putting in effort for this specific case for at least 6 years, through a combination of direct emails to Microsoft employees, bug reports on Microsoft development forums, and having our application developers submit bugs through their official channels and direct conversations with Microsoft project managers at PDC. And in all fairness, some of the bugs I've reported through this barrage of techniques have been fixed - for example, with the exception of the Syriac abbreviation mark, Syriac is looking quite good in WPF 4 (many thanks!). But I've never gotten any traction on the issue at hand.
So, are you the guy I need to be forwarding all my documentation to? Or do you know to whom at Microsoft I need to be reporting in order for this case to get a good hearing? I'm more than willing to put in all the effort you could possibly want - this is a very pressing issue for us, since we've published reams of grammatical material that now look very ugly, particularly since moving our platform to WPF.
Thanks,
Vincent
________________________________________
From: Michael S. Kaplan [michka@trigeminal.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 9:41 PM
To: Murray Sargent
Cc: Vincent Setterholm; 'Asmus Freytag'; Khaled Ghetas; verdy_p@wanadoo.fr; Otto Stolz; 'unicode@unicode.org'
Subject: RE: Generic Base Letter
Speaking as an MS employee who has seen how easy it is to put arbitrary
combining marks on scripts like Latin and Cyrillic that don't look very
good if the font has neither combined form glyphs or knowledge of
attachment points, it may be the case that some of these situations that
don't look good have more to do with the fact that making it look good
typographically when no one put in the effort for the specific case may be
simply the price one pays.
Here is a time it came for Cyrillic over five years ago (in that case for
Bulgarian): http://blogs.msdn.com/367985.aspx
Michael
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