Re: Greek characters in IPA usage

From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Aug 17 2009 - 15:19:59 CDT

  • Next message: Andreas Stötzner: "Re: Greek characters in IPA usage"

    On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:37 PM, Julian
    Bradfield<jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
    > On 2009-08-17, David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
    >> 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.

    Those two statements are contradictory. According to the Ethnologue,
    the languages with the 4th, 5th and 6th most native speakers need
    complex script shaping. People living in Morocco, Bangladesh, Nepal
    and everywhere in between, over a billion of them, all need complex
    script shaping to type their daily languages. Yes, they fail to make
    up a majority of the world, but what's the numbers on your "large user
    community"? How many people out there really can't use programs that
    use 21st century font systems, like GNOME and KDE?

    > Indeed, it's open to question
    > whether script shaping is *plain text* at all

    Unless you exclude Arabic and Hindi as plain text, no, it's not.

    >  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.

    Unicode does encode it; they would just rather not encode it using the
    hacks that the Unix font system requires, hacks that can't produce
    good output.

    > 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

    As far as I know, Pango supports bitmapped fonts. If not, then perhaps
    the smart thing to do is to improve Pango.

    -- 
    Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
    


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