RE: RTL PUA?

Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

>> Depending on how you count, there are already two to four fonts that
>> support Ewellic in the PUA. There are probably many more that
>> support Tengwar or Cirth or Klingon.
>
> First, these fonts can work fine with the default LTR directionality.
> So there's no need for additional data for them. Second, even if they
> were RTL, the needed info for each of these fonts, embedded in them
> would be extremely small, reduced to just specifying the range of RTL
> characters they need to contain.

This isn't my point. Multiple fonts can exist for PUA scripts and the
user should not have to be constrained to using just the one font which
happens to contain property information, because someone decided
properties should be stored in the font.

> So I don't see that as a problem. Those fonts do exist and are used
> exactly because there was no problem for rendering them with texts
> encoded in logical order (the same as the visual order).

Not my point.

> It's still
> strange that we can have several fonts for esoteric fonts that have
> been used effectively by very few people, when there are centuries of
> traditions, and many interested users (but spread in very small
> communities worldwide) that cannot use computer technologies to render
> their favorite scripts, or that want to teach them, or make books and
> other publications to expose them, as an important humane cultural
> heritage, even if this was only to translate them or transcribe them
> in a more modern script.

One person added Ewellic to his shareware font as an experiment, and I
paid another person to do a font for me. Sorry if this was culturally
insensitive.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14
www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell ­