[Lexicog] Unicode fonts

[William J Poser]

It occurs to me that there may be some confusion affecting the
discussion of whether or not one can use Unicode fonts for
language X or whether it is still necessary to use specialized
fonts. Just in case, let me explain.

There isn't really any such thing as a "Unicode font" - there are only
Unicode encoded fonts. The very same font can have both Unicode and
non-Unicode encodings, so long as the characters in the font are all
in the Unicode standard. So, if you have got a font for your language
that you don't want to give up because the existing Unicode fonts
are poor quality or don't exist at all, that doesn't mean that you can't
use Unicode. What you need to do in this case is re-encode your existing
font in Unicode. Most modern font formats (including TrueType) include
in the information about each glyph the associated codepoint. (I believe
that this isn't true of some old font formats, in which the encoding is
inferred from the order of the glyphs in the font file.) If you've got
a font that you like but is in some other encoding, you just go through
it with a font editor and replace the existing encoding with the Unicode
values. I've done this with a couple of fonts. It isn't all that
time-consuming. I'd estimate that I can do it in less than one minute
per character.

So, the only real stumbling block for using Unicode if you want to
would be if you need characters that are not included in Unicode.
Even there, there is a way around it, although admittedly you lose
the portability advantages of Unicode. Unicode reserves several ranges
as "Private Use Area"s, namely:
	00E000-00F8FF	Private Use Area
	0F0000-0FFFFD	Supplementary Private Use Area A
	100000-10FFFD	Supplementary Private Use Area B
If you want to use characters not currently in the Unicode standard
in a Unicode context you can assign them codepoints in one of the
Private Use Areas.

Bill


--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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