> Do we again need an intelligent font that understands language tagging?
This should be achievable with OpenType, no? > Do we now have different flavors of Unicocde, one for English, one for Icelandic, one for French, one for German ... ? In most of the cases described be you, you can still have just one Unicode character but different glyphs representing it. In OpenType, you could assign glyph substitutions to some features such as "historical forms" and do it on a language-dependant level. > Should an English language font render ö as oe, so that Göthe appears automatically in the more normal English form Goethe? If you refer to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, his name is *not* spelled with an "ö" anyway. > The use of macron for dieresis is somewhat a different matter. If a particular style of German script uses a line for a diaeresis, then indeed the diaeresis in that script has fallen together in appearance with the macron. But this doesn't mean that you have to encode it just once. Unicode should be of what characters *mean*, not what characters look like. Unfortunately, for spatial reasons, many lookalikes have been consolidated. But you can intelligently "split" them with OpenType. You can have styllistic sets that you choose basing on your preferred writing. Adam
