On Wednesday, February 21, 2001 8:50 PM
Joel Rees [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] wrote:
...
> Everyone could do what they want out there, but they would be responsible
> for publishing whatever needed to be published: representative fonts,
> mapping tables for transforming to other sets (including, of course, the
> common set), special rendering rules, compositing rules (which the IDC are
> not), collation rules, searching rules (which the IDC are part of),
> whatever.
> This implies the need for a standard to express representative fonts and
> rendering rules. It doesn't need to be fast, just needs to allow each
> standards committee to communicate their standards and exception rules with
> the others. Such a standard was not possible fifteen years ago, but I think
> it could be done now.
....
There doesn't need to be a standard for fonts and rendering rules since "smart" font
systems like OpenType, AAT and Graphite can have such rules built into the font. Since
different forms and styles of the same script may have different rules and
requirements it is the font not in a standard that such information belongs. The
creator of the font is best placed to know how the glyphs that font should combine and
be rendered for any given script /language combination and to choose which set of
glyphs need to be included. (It's perfectly possible e.g. to include regional and
historical glyph variants in a font - and features to access them - without the need
for assigning extra characters for them.)
- Chris
