At 05:34 -0600 2002-03-14, David Starner wrote: >And if it was really important, why weren't the characters that Native >American languages use encoded precomposed?
There are too many of them, and while precomposition is still easier for fonts and input methods, in the long term it won't be that way. >And if it's so important to encode minority scripts that Tengwar and >Cirth must be pushed back, why were Old Italic, Gothic and Shavian >encoded? Why are these users so much more important than the users of >Tengwar and Cirth? Etruscologists actively critiqued and supported the Old Italic proposal, and of course the repertoire was very simple. I championed Gothic because I think it's way cool, it was dead easy, and I have made a very nice font for it. (Tolkien once went to a Latin debate as a Goth and spoke Gothic to his classmates.) Shavian is also dead easy, and it and Deseret were proposed early on because they were small and easy and it was a way of getting something into the SMP. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
