Re: Quick survey of Apple symbol fonts (in context of the Wingding/Webding proposal)

On 7/15/2011 1:08 AM, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
> In WG2 N4085 "Further proposed additions to ISO/IEC 10646 and comments to other proposals" (2011‐
> 05‐25), the German NB had requested re WG2 N4022 "Proposal to add Wingdings and Webdings
> Symbols" besides other points:
> "Also, in doing this work, other fonts widespread on the computers of leading manufacturers (e.g.
> Apple) shall be included, thus avoiding the impression that Unicode or SC2/WG2 favor a single
> manufacturer."
> In supporting this, there is now a quick survey of symbol fonts regularly delivered with computers
> manufactured by Apple:
> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4127.pdf
>
> - Karl
>
>
>
  Karl,

I believe that publishing this document in its current form is a more of
a disservice than a service to the committees or the larger community (a
few individuals excepted).

There appear to be a large number of symbols for which a Unicode
equivalent can be identified with great certainty - and beyond that
there seem to be characters for which such an assignment is perhaps more
tentative, because of minor glyph differences, but still plausible.

I believe that only when these two passes have been carried out, will
the document be of any reasonable use to wider audiences - as it is,
everybody has to sift through all the characters, even the ones that are
uninteresting (because their mappings are not in question, despite lack
of glyph names).

Using Unibook, you can use the syntactic conventions of "canonical" and
"compatibility" decomposition listings to show mappings of which you are
certain or which look OK, but need verification. Entirely questionable
mappings could use the "comment" convention.

In the input file used by Unibook, a <TAB>=<SPACE> at the start of a
line, followed by a code point can be used to show an "identically
equal" sign with the mapping in the output. A <TAB>%<SPACE> would show
the "approximately equal" sign, and a <TAB>*<SPACE> would yield a bullet
(as for a comment).

Finally, you could use yellow (and/or blue) highlighting (or both) to
highlight characters needing particular levels of review.

Once you have carried the analysis to that stage, the document would
indeed be of interest for wider reviewers. It would still not be a
proposal, but you would have done the necessary legwork in *analyzing*
(or tentatively analyzing) the repertoire.

A./
Received on Fri Jul 15 2011 - 04:01:37 CDT