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

On 2011/07/15 18:51, Michael Everson wrote:
> On 15 Jul 2011, at 09:47, Andrew West wrote:

>> If you want a font to display a visible glyph for a format or space character then you should just map the glyph to its character in the font, as many fonts already do for certain format characters.
>
> Sometimes I might want to show a dotted box for NBSP and sometimes a real NBSP. Or many other characters. Or show a RTL and LTR override character without actually overriding the text. You'd need a picture for that, because just putting in a glyph for it would also override the text.

I understand the need. But then what happens is that we need a picture
in the standard for "the character that depicts an RLO (but isn't
actually one)". And then you need another character to show that
picture, and so on ad infinitum. This doesn't scale.

If we take the needs of charaacter encoding experts when they write
*about* characters to decide what to make a character, then we get many
too many characters encoded. That's similar to the need of typographers
when they talk about different character shapes. If we had encoded a
Roman 'a' and an Italic 'a' separately just because the distinction
shows up explicitly in some texts on typography, that would have been a
mistake (the separation is now available for IPA, but that's a separate
issue).

Regards, Martin.
Received on Fri Jul 15 2011 - 07:40:56 CDT