At 17:57 +0100 2002-10-30, Kent Karlsson wrote:
Nonsense. Sorry, your claim is just plain silly. I have a book on my shelf that has a nice special font which has, oh, I don't remember which, it is either a capital O with the two dots inside it or it is a capital O with a small letter e inside it. In any case it is obvious that � is the character being used, because of the language of the book, and it's just the creativity of the font designer that draws this one way or another.> 1. We have all seen examples, in print, in signage, and inhandwriting of German umlauts being displayed in each of those ways. Obviously the underlying encoding of them is the same, as is the intent.The underlying encoding *may* be the same (if there is an encoding at all...). Still, I claim, it should not be up to the font designer to make a font that shows e.g. an a-with-e-above glyph for a-diaeresis *without also* the font being explicitly requested (via some "higher-level protocol") to do such a mapping, via a "hist" feature (off by default) or whatever other mechanism. Such a mapping *amounts to* a transient character-to-character mapping.
I'll say it again: � when drawn with an e above it instead of two dots (COMBINING DIAERESIS ABOVE) is a perfectly acceptable if rare variant of �, in German at least, and if it happens to be the case that you can ALSO draw that by using the COMBINING SMALL LETTER E ABOVE is accidental. The latter was not added in order to account for the trivial font-choice typography used in German menus and book covers.
Oxford recommends "internationalization". And I am sorry, Kent, but that is an orthographic argument about strings of characters. Fonts don't change the spelling. THE SPELLING IS IN THE ENCODING. If I write the word Karlsson and the O in my font looks like a pumpkin, I have not changed the spelling of your name to one using LATIN SMALL LETTER PUMPKIN.Just as I think an "author" (I use that in a general sense) should be in charge of the spelling in a document, the "author" should be in charge of what diacritics are used. Would it be a good idea for a British font to change "color" to "colour", "i18n" to "internationalisation"?
That is not what is done in the limited realm of glyph variants for � used in German book covers and so on, which is where you see those glyph variants. It is a different thing from G�teborg and G�teborg, which is an artifact of there being a "svensk �" and a "norsk �" and the users in question having limited typographic control (such as typewriters or 7-bit character sets).AAT fonts can in principle do that (via glyph index mappings executed through a finite automaton, but that is beside the point), so should they? Is such a font (if it did this mapping by default) a Unicode font? Each item in these two example pairs are seen in print (etc.) and they are "known" to "mean" the same within each pair...There are signs (and printed texts) that say "G�teborg"; but we usually spell that "G�teborg". Does that mean that the underlying encoding (if any) therefore must be the same (the same city is intended...), and � is just a glyph variant of � (or the other way around), and a ((Unicode)) font may display � as � (without being asked to perform any extraneous mapping). Say the font is made for Norwegian. Is this all up to the font designer? This is an exact parallel to what we started off with.
The COMBNINING SMALL LETTER E ABOVE is intended for use in a very limited realm, editions of medieval German literature. The use of a similar glyph in other contexts is a different thing entirely, and it's just something we are going to have to live with.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
