From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Aug 12 2010 - 12:40:08 CDT
You seem to be missing a couple of important points here which Peter is illustrating.
First of all, what you want to do can be done with existing technology. There's no need to add variation selectors or other mechanisms to achieve your goal.
Secondly, fonts are themselves works of art, and a well-designed face will have a set of swashes appropriate face but not necessarily another face. Simply saying "I want a swash here" isn't enough. On a Mac, for example, Hoefler Text Italic has one swash available for the "t", whereas Zapfino has three, none of which are like the swash Hoefler Text Italic provides, and one of which is inappropriate for use at the end of a line. Most fonts won't have any, because swashes are usually seen as the purview of calligraphic fonts.
So what do you do? Do you provide a variation selector for every kind of swash a font designer might include to make sure you get the "right" one? Or do you just say, "Put a swash in here, I don't care what it looks like?" Neither seems like a good idea.
Note, too, that Peter used swashes where you didn't ask for them. Since we're trying to embody the swashing in plain text, doesn't that mean that he's violating what the poet was intending to say?
When you're doing real-life typography, it's really meaningless to talk about alternate glyph shapes without knowing what font you're working with.
Typography is not done with plain text.
Just to illustrate *my* point, I'm adding a PDF of four of the huge number of possibilities for laying out your first stanza with Zapfino on a Mac. Which one did the poet intend?
On Aug 12, 2010, at 5:38 AM, William_J_G Overington wrote:
> Thank you for taking the time to produce the pdf and thank you also for sharing the result.
>
> I had not known of the Gabriola font previously.
>
> I found the following page on the web.
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=372
>
> Best regards
>
> William Overington
>
> 12 August 2010
>
> On Thursday 12 August 2010, Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com> wrote:
>
>> See the attached PDF showing Unicode
>> 5.2 text set in Word 2010 using the Gabriola font with
>> line-ending characters formatted with the Stylistic Set 7
>> OpenType Feature. No PUA; no variation selectors. Just
>> flourishing, OpenType glyphs.
>>
>>
>> Peter
>>
>
>
>
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
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