"Steve White" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Joe, > >> >> • The older glyphs for the quote characters (i.e., ', ", ", ') are >> much nicer for a screen font. It would be nice to be able to get >> the old glyphs somehow.
By the way, by the last sentence I meant “it would be nice if there was some way to select the older glyphs without changing the default glyphs for these characters”. > It seems to me that yours is an aesthetic judgement about the shapes > of the glyphs. On second look, I agree. My "curly" quotes look out > of place in this face. > > The standard specifies that the glyphs should be distinct from certain > other glyphs, but their shape is only suggested. Actually (unfortunately), it turns out there are some fairly specific guidelines about the shape of these characters. I like the old freefont shapes from 2003-06-24 better, but the person who made the bug report about German use of “ (U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) and ‘ (U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) seems to be correct (unfortunately!). As evidence for their correctness, here are the entries in the official NamesList.txt file: 2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK = SINGLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK * this is the preferred glyph (as opposed to 201B) x (apostrophe - 0027) x (modifier letter turned comma - 02BB) x (heavy single turned comma quotation mark ornament - 275B) 201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK = DOUBLE TURNED COMMA QUOTATION MARK * this is the preferred glyph (as opposed to 201F) x (quotation mark - 0022) x (heavy double turned comma quotation mark ornament - 275D) x (reversed double prime quotation mark - 301D) Notice that both of these characters have alternate names that include the wording “TURNED COMMA”. In the context of Unicode character names, “TURNED” means “rotated 180°”. The older freefont glyphs for these characters are actually much closer to these other characters: 201B SINGLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK = SINGLE REVERSED COMMA QUOTATION MARK * glyph variant of 2018 x (modifier letter reversed comma - 02BD) 201F DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK = DOUBLE REVERSED COMMA QUOTATION MARK * glyph variant of 201C In the context of Unicode character names, “REVERSED” means “vertical mirror image (flipped on the vertical axis)”. The comments indicate that the glyphs for U+201B and U+201F are considered wrong for U+2018 and U+201C. > In previous releases, the quote-left U2018 was just wrong. Since I > think of these as "curly" quotes, I tried to make them curly, and > distinct from "primes" (U2032+). But the standard doesn't say the > quotes have to be distinct from the primes. I think cases where it > would matter, would be very rare, and questionable. I disagree on this point. I personally find it very important that primes and quotes are distinct, because I use both heavily. (I'm a mathematician.) > So basically, I put the shapes back as they were, like the comma in > Mono, and just made sure the directions and senses of the quotes > matched the standard. > > To appear in the next release. Can you e-mail PNG images of what the changed glyphs look like? -- Joe -- Heriot-Watt University is a Scottish charity registered under charity number SC000278