ELL: Fonts

[Peter Constable]

On 09/23/2001 07:33:50 AM Andrew Cunningham wrote:


>> There are more than one code points allocated for the character "A",
>> e.g.,
>> code point U+0041, U+0391, U+0410.
>
>true, if you are from the camp that believes that teh Latin "A" is
exactly the
>same character as Cyrillic and Greek characters with the same shape.
>
>and that would be like trying to collapse all the indic langauges into a
single
>script.

The general rule is that Unicode unifies characters across languages
within scripts, but not across scripts.



>> Earlier in Unicode's history than the present moment, this was not the
>> rule,
>> e.g., code points U+00C0, U+00C1, U+00C2, U+00C3, U+00C4, U+00C5.
>>
>> Unicode is a product of its creators and their history. It has warts
>> and
>> inconsistencies. It also has the occasional error.
>>
>
>also true. from memory the usual explanation given was to enable a simple
1-1
>correspondance and conversion with existing national and international
>standards.

That is more than the usual explanation -- backward compatibility is the
reason that these precomposed characters are included.



>the current reality is that its very unlikely that additional precomposed
>characters will be encoded, or at leats thats my current understanding.

Absolutely true.


>Although
>it isn't relevant to most languages, it is relevant to a range of african
>languages for instance.

Not once we have software that can handle positioning of Latin combining
marks. Our Graphite rendering technology handles that now, as does Apple's
AAT. Uniscribe will support this *very soon*.



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable at sil.org>
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