From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > At 16:45 -0700 2003-06-20, Richard Cook wrote: > >Of course, in pop e-print, nearly everything that can be done to a > >character is done ... including Bold-Ital-Outline-Shadow ... > > Hey, there's no reason only Latin typography should be filled with vulgarism...
If you just look at Japanese, you'll see that most Hiragana andKatakana text use both narrow (half-width) and square (full-width) style within the same font but with distinct characters. In Latin text, it is most often rendered with the same characters but with different fonts. Some typographic effects have different usage patterns between Latin/Greek/Cyrillic/ Hebrew and Asian text. Italic is one of these, and in HTML its use has been deprecated in favor of a more language neutral "emphasized" style (which can be right-slanted with Latin/Greek/Cyrillic, but can be a distinct font or typographic effect applied to some base font). In strict typographic terms, the "italic" style modifier is just a convenience to select actually distinct fonts. It's true that Arabic is, in its natural form, already right-slanted and would not support being more slanted than it is now. Slanting artificially a font which contains characters that are already slanted such as Arabic, or should not be slanted like Han is quite disastrous for the reader. Other typographic effects are much more language neutral such as font scaling, and varying the inter-letter spacing (but with interesting problems with Arabic and Devanagari where most characters should be kept ligated, by changing the length of the horizontal ligating stroke), or adjustment of margins, usage of borders around paragraphs, and distinct shading of backgrounds. When I look at most Asian web pages, Bold and Italic or other typographic effects used to emphasize some text is often rendered by using distinct colors or gray scales. It's interesting to see the colorful patchwork commonly found in Asian web pages, even the most serious ones that consist mostly of annotated text... Also, the Outline and Shadow styles are much more often used in Asian compositions than with Latin, notably for titling. And the range of point sizes used on the same page is much more important in Asian pages than in Latin/Cyrillic/Greek/Hebrew) pages. So any attempt to force mapping a italic or bold style on any text seems disastrous. It seems more intelligent to try mapping some conceptual styles like "emphasized" or "quoted" or "footnote" within stylesheets where actual fonts can be selected according to a language context. But this goes far beyond what Unicode can do (stylesheets are better studied by the W3C style/CSS working groups).
