At 18:49 7/2/2002, Michael Everson wrote: >>Alas, but that's technically impossible. Both OT and AAT (I'm not sure >>about Graphite) require that single characters map to single glyphs, >>which are then processed. > >Hm? How do you handle the decomposed sequence A + COMBINING ACUTE? Surely >that is a sequence of characters mapping to a single glyph.
Nope. That's two characters mapped to two glyphs that might be represented by a) character level mapping of two characters to a single character represented by a single glyph; b) character level mapping of two characters to a single character represented in glyph level processing by two glyphs; c) glyph level mapping of two glyphs to a single glyph; d) glyph level positioning of two glyphs to form a single typeform (grapheme). There may be other variations. The CMAP table maps individual glyphs to one or more characters. It cannot map sequences of characters to glyphs, or sequences of glyphs to characters. >>(In OT, of course, you are also supposed to do some preprocessing in >>character space, but that doesn't solve this problem.) It would be nice >>to have a cmap format which maps multiple characters to single glyphs >>initially. > >I always thought there was. Now I'm really confused as to how I would make >a complex Indic syllable. See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/default.htm, especially the section on Uniscribe in the 'Overview' part, which includes a step-by-step analysis of the shaping of a Sanskrit word. The AAT approach is, of course, a bit different, because the character-level re-ordering takes place at the glyph level along with everything else. John Hudson Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED] Language must belong to the Other -- to my linguistic community as a whole -- before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. - Terry Eagleton
