Re: A last missing link for interoperable representation

On 1/9/19 2:30 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:

English use of italics on isolated words to disambiguate the reading of some sentences is a convention. Everybody who does it, does it the same way. Not supported in plain text.

German books from the Fraktur age used Antiqua for Latin and other foreign terms. Definitely a convention that was rather universally applied (in books at least). Not supported in plain text.

Aren't there printing conventions that indicate this type of "contrastive stress" using letterspacing instead of font style?  I'm s u r e I've seen it in German and other Latin-written languages, and also even occasionally in Hebrew, whose experiments with italics tend not to be encouraging.

That's a related issue. Fraktur doesn't have an italic style, so emphasis is generally done by letterspacing -- and that letterspacing better respect the mandatory ligatures in Fraktur (they are neither spaced, nor replaced by non-ligated letters).

Because of the fact that typesetting Fraktur follows a number a number of conventions not found when the same text is typeset in Roman fonts, there's simply no way that you can shift between these by something like a simple style sheet, and definitely not by taking plain text and globally selecting a Fraktur font (see foreign terms issue above).

Theoretically, you should be able to do so, because Latin script use across all typographic traditions is unified in the encoding, but in practice, you'll run into limitations and only some final-form rich text format (like PDF) will guarantee that stuff appears correct and as intended.

This is perhaps interesting because many books of the period exist in editions in either typographic style. Trying to get the two different renditions from the same "backbone" would require, at a minimum, very careful semantic mark-up (e.g. identifying foreign words) and a non-trivial stylesheet (assuming that you can even get the correct letterspacing done by your rendering engine).

A./