So is the idea of standard to cover different languages or not? Russian and
Serbian are different languages, not a variants of the same language. Also,
the problem is that the letter does not look the same AT ALL. Serbian would
not read "m" as "t" ever, when it occurs in the text. We are not talking
about different kerning, but about completely different letter.
Unfortunatelly for us, this is not visible when it is not italic only by
accident. I will send you the GIF, I think then both sides would know what
they are talking about?
-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Sent: Donnerstag, 30. Dezember 1999 15:55
To: Unicode List
Subject: Re: Unicode Cyrillic GHE DE PE TE in Serbian
Janko Stamenovic wrote:
> - Should be four additional characters for Cyrillic Serbian letters which
> are different in italics from Russian letters introduced to Unicode?
No, this is really awful. Different national conventions for writing
what is the same letter (and only in italic face, at that) ought not to be
perpetuated *in a character standard*. Which is not the same as saying
that they should be abandoned altogether.
> - Is there some other way which would allow standardization? As far as I
can
> see current situation, it would be quite unrealistic to have "Serbian" and
> "Russian" version of unicode fonts. Then Russian would not be able to
write
> Serbian and vice versa with one Unicode font?
On the contrary, this is probably the best solution. "Unicode fonts",
meaning
single fonts meant to cover the whole of Unicode, or a big chunk of it,
don't
really make sense except as fallbacks (they're better than lots of black
boxes,
of course). Serbian should be written in a font tuned for Serbian, and
Russian
likewise.
A Latin-alphabet example that has been discussed here in the past is the
Polish accent marks, which look the same as Western European ones but are
kerned lower down on the letter. Fine Polish typography, then, should use
specially tuned Polish fonts, and mixed Polish/French typography should use
different fonts (not massively different, just subtly different) for the
Polish and French text.
--Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)
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