Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
> Thanks: a great work!
>
Thank you!
> Unluckily, I am totally unable to see the extended planes glyphs in Windows
> NT, but I understand from other peoples' comments that it will work fine as
> soon as I step to Windows 2000.
>
> I see that Code2001 is missing most of the BMP characters that are in
> Code2000. Do you have plans to merge the two fonts? It would be nice to have
> all the basic glyphs for most of Unicode in a single resource.
>
It would be nice, but there are some barriers to this.
There's a limit to the number of glyphs which a TTF/OTF can
contain, 65536. From following other e-lists, this 'ceiling'
isn't likely to change. Since Unicode already includes over 65536
characters (and additional forms are needed for various scripts
in addition to the encoded base characters)... it was my thought
to produce a family of "Code2" fonts, with Code2000 being
Plane 0, Code2001 Plane 1, Code2002 etc.
But even that approach needs some compromise. For example,
a Unicode font dedicated to mathematics should include the
mathematic alphabets in Plane One and all of the math symbols
from the BMP (plus basic Latin and Greek) in order to be really
useful. Gothic needs at least one glyph from the combining
diacritic range and a CJK font with only Plane Two characters
would only be good for populating Plane Two charts.
Another issue concerns variants, the Gothic letter "i" with and
without diaeresis is a good example for this, too. Since the
Gothic letter requires a combining diacritic at times, any BMP
font which covers Latin extensions will run into problems. Either
the default diacritic will appear over the Gothic letter in a
different style (two perfect circles which would look inappropriate
with a calligraphic Gothic typeface)... or, if the type designer
used calligraphic diaeresis the problem would appear with Latin
base letters. (If you want an example, make a u-umlaut with
Code2001 active using the "u" + combining diaeresis.) Using OpenType
features to substitute the diaeresis glyph would be a great solution,
except that OpenType requires valid script tags for look-ups and
there is no script tag for Gothic yet (as far as I know).
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:15 EDT