At 10:21 11/4/2002, Otto Stolz wrote:
It's back.A common Cyrillic example is the difference in the italic forms for, e. g., Russian and Serbian, cf. "Rendering Serbian italics" (used to be at <http://www.tiro.com/transfer/Serbian_Rendering.pdf> -- John, can we have it back?).
I have not read through all Doug's arguments in favour of the Plane 14 language tags, but one comment I will make about the kind of glyph preference represented by the Serbian example is that is not always neatly expressible using natural language tags, since the preferences might cultural or historical: identified with particular user communities, sometimes distinct from the main body of language users, or with specific periods. For this reason, the OpenType 'language system' tags are better understood as typographic system tags, and it is not clear to me that it would always be possible or desirable to link a particular OT typographic tag to a particular Plane 14 language tag -- or, indeed, to any language tag: there have been discussions on the OT list regarding the validity of applying, e.g. a French typographic system tag to Greek text to produce conventional French typography for classical texts as distinct from British or German conventions. My view is that typographic system tagging of the kind enabled in OT should be separately applied at a level above language tagging. Language tagging is useful for determining sorting order, dictionary support for spellchecking, etc.; typographic system tagging is useful for determining how text should be displayed.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467
