From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 19:52:30 EST
At 01:32 PM 12/17/2002, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>Peter Lofting asked:
>
> > Presumedly the present proposal of 900+ stacks is a maturation of the
> > same system. And the claim for universality is based on it being able
> > to typeset everything they have published to-date.
>
>It is based on the Founders system software, as Michael mentioned.
Steve Hartwell -- who has worked with Peter in the past on Tibetan
implementation for Apple -- and I met two people from Founders at the
Microsoft OpenType seminar in August. Their understanding of Tibetan seemed
to be heavily influenced by preconceptions based on Chinese scripts
(including setting the glyphs on fixed ideographic widths) and ignored the
nature of the Indic scripts that influenced the development of Tibetan.
Ironically, considering this Chinese proposal based on the Founders system,
the representatives we met with very quickly understood the value of the
OpenType glyph substitution and positioning that Steve explained to them,
and immediately saw the value of this technology in handling Tibetan stack
formation. So it is possible that while this new proposal might find
support for reasons of backwards compatibility and handling of existing
data, Founders themselves might begin to treat Tibetan as the complex
script it is.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare,
or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you
like your shadow and becomes a part of you.
- al-Jahiz, The Book of Animals
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