From: Julian Bradfield (jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 17 2009 - 14:37:04 CDT
On 2009-08-17, David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/8/17 John H. Jenkins <jenkins@apple.com>:
>> 在 Aug 15, 2009 8:24 AM 時， Julian Bradfield 寫到：
>>> However, there is no way the core font system can ever handle
>>> variation selectors - it just doesn't have the mechanism. It would
[...]
>> The current version of the OpenType spec provides for support of variation
>> selectors at the font level.
>
> The statement was about the X11 core font system. I'm not sure I buy
> that it's worth Unicode worrying about; it has no support for complex
> script shaping, for one.
That's another example of the Unicode zealot's dismissal of a large
user community with a huge existing base. The majority of the world
doesn't need complex script shaping. Indeed, it's open to question
whether script shaping is *plain text* at all (which is surely why
Unicode dislikes the coding of shaped forms, though it has often been
coerced into doing it). Dismissing a widely used system because it
can't do something that Unicode explicitly doesn't wish to encode is
strange, to say the least.
I personally stick to the core font system because I find bitmapped
fonts far clearer and easier to read than ****type fonts in the sizes
I use - and BDF is a hell of a lot easier to edit than ****type when you need
another character, be it an obscure hanzi or a phonetic symbol. I
gather that many CJK users, who are a non-trivial community, find the
same, hence the rather large effort put into the wenquanyi bitmap fonts.
Incidentally, Wikipedia currently says (under "OpenType") that
Opentype has no font-internal support for complex script shaping. If
that's not the case, perhaps you could correct it?
If it is the case, then what's so different from doing client-side
script-shaping with bitmapped fonts, which you could also do?
(That is a question - I know almost nothing about complex layout, nor
about how OpenType fits with X, since I don't use a language requiring
complex shaping.)
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