On Mon, Jul 05, 1999 at 12:36:05PM -0700, Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
> This has been attempted. Cf. ISO 10036, which describes how to add glyphs to an
> international standard for glyphs.
Thank you.
> This registry is being maintained by the
> Association for Font Information Interchange. It has been somewhat moribund for
> the past few years, however, apparently due to lack of interest.
After a brief web search I can see why. Any link leading directly to ISO 10036
gave me a "Forbidden" page.
The AFII page made it clear they are for people much wealthier than me. Plus,
they notified ISO two years ago they would no longer maintain the ISO 10036
registry.
> Please note that the problems a glyph standard like that of ISO 10036 are mostly
> those of font developers and not at all of application developers.
Yes, that's the idea.
> Just because
> we agree that the glyph dotless j will have an id of x00000123 (or whatever it
> actually is), that doesn't do anything for application developers or for users.
Sure it does if the operating system handles it properly. Not that any of them
does at this time, but it is quite doable. What is lacking is an open standard.
> In the suggested model, the user still enters dotfull j plus whatever combining
> diacritics into their document, i.e. the application is still working with
> Unicode sans any dotless j. It is still up to the system or whatever rendering
> engine the app is depending upon to get the dotless glyph. This can be done with
> a glyph registry, but it can also be done without it.
The difference is that if there were a registry, we would have a standard way
of doing this. We could develop software that works under Unix and Windows and
Mac, and what not, and works the same way. In other words, we would have
portability on the system level.
For that, we would need a registry that lets anyone download its database the
same way Unicode Consortium lets anyone download theirs.
> Either way, it's done
> without adding the dotless j to Unicode, which is what this thread is all about.
I would be perfectly happy if it were added to a glyph standard and not to
Unicode, providing the standard would be available in some form to any
software developer and font designer without having to pay thousands of
dollars every year.
Perhaps I should just start my own open glyph registry. I have done crazier
things than that. :-)
Adam
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT