From: David Starner (starner@okstate.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 29 2002 - 22:29:08 EST
On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 08:53:59PM -0500, Jim Allan wrote:
> Using the Unicode method makes far more sense than creating fonts that
> work for particular languages only, provided no foreign words or names
> appear, or which require language tagging.
Why does the Unicode method exclude creating fonts that work for
particular language only? A lot of fontmakers specialize in the one
purpose font, and may not want or need to put in the time to cover
multiple languages.
> Marco's desire to use a font to indicate combining superscript einstead
> of the way Unicode wants it done seems prompted because currently most
> Unicode fonts do not currently support the combinining superscript
> characters and he wishes a fallback to normal diaeresis instead of to an
> undefined character indicator.
It was my wish, and it had nothing to do with that. I was looking at the
book mentioned in my first message, which was printed in 1920 and yet
used the superscript e instead of an umlaut. I thought about encoding
that font in a computer, and then about printing a text in the font. If
I take a sample German text, and want to print it in this font, why
should I have to change the text? The text hasn't changed, just the
presentation. While _I_ could change the text, the average user would
probably find it prohibatively complex, and even if walked throught it,
would be frustrated to have to put so much work into it.
As for the concerns brought up by you and Marc, I find them absurd in
this case. This font won't support other languages, because the book
doesn't have the glyphs for them. (Not even ô or ï, if you're one of the
people who think English needs them.) The font's not made for academic
or scholarly work, and even if I were to encode the a-e in an a-e slot,
it probably won't have a proper a-diaresis.
-- David Starner - starner@okstate.edu Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom-- A field where a thousand corpses lie. -- Stephen Crane, "War is Kind"
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