Re: Anything from the Symbol font to add along with W*dings?

The whole point of so-called symbol fonts is to allow (non-Unicode) applications to display these symbols while acting as though they are displaying ordinary Latin-1 text. It would be counterproductive for makers of such fonts to include, as it were, a health warning that the font should not be used for this purpose.

People might continue to use font-face with symbol fonts even for characters that exist in Unicode, and we can recommend against it; but they will definitely do so for characters that are not in Unicode, and telling them to use layout won't impress them.

------Original Message------
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Sender: unicode-bounce_at_unicode.org
To: unicode_at_unicode.org
Subject: Re: Anything from the Symbol font to add along with W*dings?
Sent: Aug 14, 2011 13:51

14.8.2011 17:51, Doug Ewell wrote:

> This sounds like Jukka expects browsers to analyze the glyph assigned in
> the font to the code position for 'a' and decline to display it if it
> doesn't look enough like an 'a' (rejecting, for example, Greek 'α'). I'm
> not sure that is a reasonable expectation.

That wouldn’t be reasonable, but what I expect is that fonts have
information about the characters that the glyphs are for and browsers
use that information. Something like that is required for implementing
the CSS font matching algorithm:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#algorithm

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
--
Doug Ewell • doug_at_ewellic.org
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