On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 08:53:59PM -0500, Jim Allan wrote: > Using the Unicode method makes far more sense than creating fonts that > work for particular languages only, provided no foreign words or names > appear, or which require language tagging.
Why does the Unicode method exclude creating fonts that work for particular language only? A lot of fontmakers specialize in the one purpose font, and may not want or need to put in the time to cover multiple languages. > Marco's desire to use a font to indicate combining superscript einstead > of the way Unicode wants it done seems prompted because currently most > Unicode fonts do not currently support the combinining superscript > characters and he wishes a fallback to normal diaeresis instead of to an > undefined character indicator. It was my wish, and it had nothing to do with that. I was looking at the book mentioned in my first message, which was printed in 1920 and yet used the superscript e instead of an umlaut. I thought about encoding that font in a computer, and then about printing a text in the font. If I take a sample German text, and want to print it in this font, why should I have to change the text? The text hasn't changed, just the presentation. While _I_ could change the text, the average user would probably find it prohibatively complex, and even if walked throught it, would be frustrated to have to put so much work into it. As for the concerns brought up by you and Marc, I find them absurd in this case. This font won't support other languages, because the book doesn't have the glyphs for them. (Not even � or �, if you're one of the people who think English needs them.) The font's not made for academic or scholarly work, and even if I were to encode the a-e in an a-e slot, it probably won't have a proper a-diaresis. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom-- A field where a thousand corpses lie. -- Stephen Crane, "War is Kind"
