From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2007 - 11:40:39 CST
On 1/25/2007 8:48 PM, Adam Twardoch wrote:
> John Hudson wrote:
>> Right, but deciding to use fraktur is itself a stylistic preference.
>> I'm not sure that going through a text that one has decided to set in
>> fraktur -- or which might possible be displayed in Fraktur -- and
>> inserting ZWJ everywhere one wanted ligation to occure and/or ZWNJ
>> everywhere one didn't want it is a sensible way to enable the
>> orthographic impact of this deicision.
> It is. It’s like typing "k" vs. "c" or "s" vs. "z" in some languages
> (if they’re homophones). Thw immediate problem is that there are still
> no cross-platform compatible input methods for scientific publishing
> that would go beyond a typical QWERTY keyboard layout. (All the
> "special" input methods are a bit insular). But given that you solve
> the problem of typing ZWJ and ZWNJ, the rest is a matter of editing
> the text. Just like you have to make sure in regular text that your
> quotation marks or dashes are right, in fraktur publishing, you need
> to make sure that your long vs. short "s"s are where they should be,
> and that the ligatures are where they should be.
Had forgotten that one. Yes, Fraktur needs both, that's why we coded
long s. It's another example, by the way, of something that cannot be
converted automatically without knowing the meaning of each word. It's
not merely positional.
>> There isn't even any way to signal to an application or layout engine
>> that a given font is fraktur.
> It’s an interesting case. First of all, saying "fraktur" is wrong
> because fraktur is only a subset of blackletter. In early 20th
> century, blackletter was considered a different writing system from
> "Antiqua" (Roman alphabet) for example in Germany. There was an
> opposition between the Roman alphabet and blackletter. When the Nazis
> abandoned blackletter, it was as if they switched to a different
> writing system.
I've always wondered about that. My feeling is that the change was
something that was already part of the times, and that the radical
political upheavals just helped it along. From reading some histories, I
get the impression that they were tapping into (and instrumentalizing) a
wider-spread urge for modernization in a number of areas, and updating
the typography would be a logical example.
>
> In OpenType, it is actually possible to share Unicode codepoints
> between different writing system. The languagesystem tagging mechanism
> allows to specify that a certain glyph represents the codepoint U+0041
> in Latin script (script tag "latn") or it represents the codepoint
> U+0041 in Blackletter script (potentially, script tag e.g. "blak").
> What do you think, John?
>
The script tag would be "latf" and it's already defined in the ISO 15924
registry.
A./
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