From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Mon Nov 22 2004 - 05:10:50 CST
On 21/11/2004 23:47, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> From: "Edward H. Trager" <ehtrager@umich.edu>
>
>> Are you saying the difference in names is "SIL Ezra" vs. "Ezra SIL" ?
>> That's too confusing!
>
>
> You're not alone to be confused. I had completely forgotten the
> existence of two versions of the same font design. I may have just
> seen that it used PUAs, so I did not install it (I did not remember
> that it used PUAs, and the wording of the sentence that introduced it
> in this discussion made me think that it was NOT using Unicode, and
> thus not PUAs which are Unicode things; that's where I supposed it was
> using some legacy Latin-1 override or similar hacks found in some
> special-purpose fonts, or in legacy non-TrueType-based font formats,
> like PostScript mappings within a 0-based indexed vector or hashed
> dictionnary of glyph names...)
>
Perhaps I should clarify further. SIL Ezra was designed to use "legacy
Latin-1 override or similar hacks". For example, in its Windows
Character Set table it uses 0x41/0x61 for "a" sounds, 0x42/0x62 for "b"
sounds etc - although it goes beyond Latin-1 in using nearly every code
point from 32 to 255. But for various technical reasons connected with
Windows, it is encoded as a Windows Symbol font, which means that its
Unicode tables are mapped not to U+0020 to U+00FF, but to U+F020 to
U+F0FF, following Windows Symbol conventions. This makes it rather less
of hack in that PUA characters are used rather than regular Unicode code
points being reused. And it can only be called a hack in retrospect, for
it was designed at a time when full Unicode Hebrew was barely defined
and certainly not widely implemented.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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