On 08/13/2000 11:37:11 PM Doug Ewell wrote: [snip] >It scares me whenever someone proposes that proprietary font mechanisms >should be necessary to render Unicode correctly. Marco Cimarosti >expressed the same concern earlier. No matter how "open" OpenType, >TrueType, AAT, ATSUI, etc. are or claim to be, there *must* be a way to >render Unicode characters correctly without relying on them. I don't >even know what a GSUB or a GPOS is, and as a Unicode user and >implementor (but not a font designer) I shouldn't have to. These font technologies are just supposed to work, without the user needing to know any differently. But, if the user *does* know the difference, then they also hold the potential for some advanced capabilities, such as discretionary ligation. Now there are two caveats to making these fonts just work: - There must be application support (on Mac OS, apps must be written to the appropriate interfaces; on Windows, Uniscribe is now provided using the standard interfaces, but Uniscribe limits you to only those capabilities that have been programmed into Uniscribe). - Some other infrastructure pieces are needed to make the picture complete, specifically tagging runs of text to indicate language and/or writing system, and the app pass that info on to the font/rendering system. This is so that fonts will apply writing system-specific behaviours without user intervention; e.g. not doing fi ligation be default for Turkish, and picking alternate italic forms in Cyrillic for certain languages. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
