From: Gregg Reynolds (unicode@arabink.com)
Date: Mon Jul 11 2005 - 13:39:22 CDT
Asmus Freytag wrote:
> At 04:54 AM 7/11/2005, Gregg Reynolds wrote:
>
> I've been waiting for you to come up with a hard case. Here's one: if
Will do. Real Soon Now. ;) Unfortunately, it's not exactly a Unicode
case; it comes from a speculative design for Arabic encoding. But still
I think it's an interesting graphic design problem.
All the stuff you mention is of course the Right Way To Go for 99% of
the world. I always like to have a by-hand fallback, however. I was
using Babelpad to do some proofreading of a semi-customized text/font
combination. (Babelpad shows the Unicode number and name of the char
under cursor). I found a few cases where the underlying text data
didn't map to the expected glyph. So I thought, it would be way better
to have a font that reveals stuff like that directly, instead of having
to inspect character codes and names.
One of the other posters mentioned an app that shows decomposed forms as
two distinct chars, e.g. a^ instead of â. That still doesn't work,
because it doesn't tell you if the ^ is a combining char or not. If it
had the little dotted circle under it it would work (I've seen this in
various programs but I forget which). But I was thinking more along the
lines of a font that would show both composed and decomposed versions
using (nearly) the same â glyph, but would somehow signal that one is
composed and the other isn't. For example, you could make the interior
of the a (the ear? I forget the term) black, or put a little cross in
there, or something like that. Then it would be very easy to read the
text and still see what the underlying structure is. And you'd really
only need one such font, since it wouldn't be designed for printing or
normal viewing. It could be ghastly and still work.
thx,
-gregg
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