on 12/28/99 9:14 AM, Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com at Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com
wrote:
> In the cases when these differences become significant, there should be a
> way to encode them in plain text, if some general solutions like a ligator
> mechanism are not found, people will keep on asking new ligatures or
> variants for ever -- because they need them, not because they are are all
> dummies.
>
Here I disagree. The problem is that the power of the more advanced
typographic systems (AAT/OT) has been restricted to high-end applications
that most people don't use. The average computer user has been restricted
to systems and applications that don't implement the character-glyph model
and so remains locked in the assumption that every blob they want to see on
the screen *must* be separately encoded within the character set in order to
be able to see it.
We'll have crossed a major bridge when Microsoft releases a version of Word
with full OT support and then people can see how they can get precisely what
they want without resorting to separate encoding for every glyph.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
tseng@blueneptune.com
http://www.blueneptune.com/~tseng
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