From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Aug 25 2005 - 23:24:46 CDT
From: "Richard Wordingham" <richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com>
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
>> There's a difficulty with the fact that most Asian fonts implement at
>> least Basic Latin, or Latin-1, without covering the whole Latin script.
>
>> My opinion is that those Asian fonts should have ALL their Latin and
>> punctuation characters removed, so that a renderer will not select those
>> fonts for rendering only partial Latin text with them, and the rest of
>> the text with another font designed for another script (the result looks
>> horrible...).
>
> That'll stop Asian cheapskates writing web pages using simple editors!
> Do you really wish to cripple programming in this fashion?
Asian editors already have to manage several fonts since long (in fact it
was the case before the first Unicode fonts or pan-CJK fonts appeared, as
there were limitation in font technologies, requiring selecting fonts
depending on the EUC encoding prefixes that select smaller pages with one
font for each of them).
But the basic editors like Notepad where one just selects a single font also
have the necessary support to use fallback fonts for the ranges not convered
by the current font. Fallback fonts, if they are effectively built using a
single-script policy, and they are correctly setup in the default
environment, will behave gracefully.
Better editors will allow you to select the font to use for each script...
I see no reason why the need for progammers (that have very limited
typography needs) would impair the facility demanded by most users for
rendering the humane languages. Programmers will keep their technical
solutions and their specific fonts if they wish, but this should not be the
case for most users, and once you've done the right thing for most users,
the programmers will also no more use the legacy font system, because it
won't longer be needed.
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