On Sun, 4 Jul 1999 11:11:47 -0700 (PDT), G. Adam Stanislav wrote:
>How do you make a j lose its dot if you do not have a dotless j available?
>I don't get it. It would seem to make sense to me to bend the rules in this
>case and have a dotless j even if it is a glyph and not a character used
>by any language.
>
>If we really want to convince all programmers to use Unicode, we can hardly
>insist that they add low level code to every single program they write to
>remove the dot from the j by directly manipulating the fonts.
To remove the dot is the job of the operating system (or better: GUI)
with its display engine (font management, character rendering). This
engine has to select a 'dotless j' glyph from its glyph collection
("font") to combine it with a circumflex even if 'dotless j' does not
exist as a character in Unicode.
If the display engine of your operating system (or publishing system
or whatever) isn't capable of doing this, please contact the
manufacturer of the system ;-)
>Wouldn't it be considerably simpler to just add a dotless j to the Unicode
>standard so that font designers become motivated to include it in the
>fonts?
You would have to add a lot of presentation forms of the Indian
scripts (Devanagari, etc.). Unicode is a standard for encoding
characters not glyphs. There does exist legacy presentation forms that
have been included in Unicode for backward compatibility. I don't like
it very much, but nobody asked me ;-)
In the times of Unicode we need more sophisticated display engines.
The times of "mapping a character code to a bitmap" are over!
Torsten
-- Torsten Mohrin Sharmahd Computing GmbH, Hannover, Germany Phone: +49-511-13780, Fax: +49-511-13450 http://www.sharmahd.com, mohrin@sharmahd.com
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