From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Mon Nov 17 2008 - 01:06:05 CST
Support for anchor attachment positioning of combining marks
(mark-to-base and mark-to-mark) is the forward edge of current font
development. It is something that has been widely implemented for some
years for complex scripts, but only recently have the makers of fonts
for European scripts begun to address this and, not surprisingly, there
are some misconceptions and mistakes to be addressed. As the examples
posted here over the last few days demonstrate, even those developers
such as SIL and Microsoft who are providing mark attachment support for
Latin script bases may not provide the same level of support for
Cyrillic and Greek.
I have recently been working on adding mark attachment positioning for
all three of these scripts to a large font. It is an aspect of font
development for which a good workflow has yet to be developed, and I
hope to sit down with some colleagues next month, share observations on
recent experience in this area, and see if we can come up with some
recommendations for best practices, tool improvements, etc. Ensuring
that all the scripts in a font get the same level of support will be on
the agenda.
I should add that the presence of precomposed diacritic characters in
Unicode massively complicates the job of mark attachment positioning,
requiring either glyph-level decomposition to base+mark sequences or
definition of anchors on every precomposed diacritic glyph as well as
simple bases. Having two mechanisms to achieve the same typeform display
is always more work than having one.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com You can't build a healthy democracy with people who believe in little green men from Venus. -- Arthur C. Clark
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