At 06:17 12/2/2001, Stefan Persson wrote:
>Well, this character is *only* used in Swedish, while & is used in most
>(all?) languages using Roman letters, so it has a partially different usage!
>Using this character in, for example, an English text would be *wrong*!
Which is why I went on to suggest that the Swedish manuscript ampersand
form (the 'och' abbreviation) might be substituted 'in Swedish text'. The
OpenType glyph substitution model, for example, associates lookups with
particular script and language system combination, so it is possible to to
have something like this:
Latin <latn>
Swedish <SWE>
Stylistic Alternates <salt>
ampersand -> ampersand.swe
This substitution would only be applied in Swedish text. Now, this
particular aspect of OpenType is not well supported yet, but it is a viable
mechanism for the kind of substitution that the 'och' glyph requires.
Please note that I am not saying that the 'och' should not be encoded, only
that there may well be good reasons to consider this form as a glyph
variant and existing technologies for dealing with it as such. In order to
make a case for encoding the 'och' ampersand, I think you will need to
demonstate a need to distinguish it from the regular ampersand in plain
text documents.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
... es ist ein unwiederbringliches Bild der Vergangenheit,
das mit jeder Gegenwart zu verschwinden droht, die sich
nicht in ihm gemeint erkannte.
... every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin
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