From: Mete Kural (metek@touchtonecorp.com)
Date: Sun Jun 19 2005 - 20:32:06 CDT
Yes I now understand John, taking a
second thought at it after your email
that its pretty much in the hands of
font and software developers to
implement the colouration feature or
not and since less than 1% does not
justify the investment for them so
they don't do it. I think I
misunderstood Michael so sorry. I
think though that considering that
Unicode is probably 99% of the time
utilized within rich text
documents(probably HTML, Word
and OpenOffice documents
constitute the vast majority of this
99%) Unicode Consortium should
produce more recommendations and
direction that dwell into issues as
coloration such as the document that
Asmus co-authored. Then font and
software developers can choose to
either implement it or not. Asmus are
you gonna get busy on this? :)
I guess what prompted me to write
that answer is that I have witnessed
the less than 1% Arabic typography
argument when discussing additions
to the Unicode Arabic block to
support certain rare Quranic
orthographic features so I mistakenly
generalized his response with that
camp. Sorry Michael.
Kind regards,
Mete
---------- Original Message
----------------------------------
From: John Hudson <tiro@tiro.com>
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 14:07:27
-0700
>Mete Kural wrote:
>
>> I do not think it is consistent of
you to marginalize Arabic pedagogical
books since it is less than 1% of
Arabic typesetting. Nor I believe it is
consistent with the above mentioned
intention of the Unicode standard to
support "the needs of all types of
users, whether in business or
academia, using mainstream or
minority scripts."
>
>I don't think Michael is marginalising
Arabic pedagogical books at all, and
certainly not
>in terms of Unicode encoding. The
discussion is about colouration of text
for such books,
>and as has been clearly stated such
colouration has nothing to do with
text encoding per
>se. So what you quote from the
Unicode FAQ is irrelevant to the
discussion.
>
>Michael's observation about books
requiring *this kind of colour
intervention* being less
>than 1% of Arabic typesetting --
quite a lot less than 1%, I would think
-- makes the very
>simple point that such a small level of
demand isn't likely to get much
attention from the
>makers of fonts and software,
especially if supporting it would mean
a complete overhaul
>of their existing products. Unicode
itself is committed to 'the needs of all
types of
>users, whether in business or
academia, using mainstream or
minority scripts', but font
>and software developers prioritise
things based on demand. I've spent
many weeks building
>contextual mark positioning lookups
for Arabic fonts, even though I know
that the
>percentage of vocalised text is
relatively small: I do as much as I can
to refine the mark
>positioning in the time available and
as the budget permits. I know how
much investment
>Arabic font development takes --
and how much piracy there is in the
market --, and I
>can't see anyone prioritising
colouration of bits of ligatures unless it
was as part of a
>specific commission, e.g. a font
made precisely for the kind of books
to which you refer.
>It is unrealistic to think that so small
a demand will pay for the
development of more
>than one or two fonts made for
such purposes.
>
>John Hudson
>
>--
>
>Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
>Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com
>
>Currently reading:
>Truth and tolerance, by Benedict
XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger as was
>An autobiography from the Jesuit
underground, by William Weston SJ
>War (revised edition), by Gwynne
Dyer
>
-- Mete Kural Touchtone Corporation 714-755-2810 --
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