On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 04:13:44 -0800 (PST), Rick McGowan wrote: > Not really. Perfectly nice font designs for Tibetan don't need 800 odd > glyphs, they can work very well with a small number of pieces and combine > them at run-time. What you need is pretty much a set of full-height things > and a set of half-height things... Take a look at just about any non-PRC > Tibetan font.
Well, I'll admit that I'm not a fontographer, and may not know what I'm talking about when it comes to designing a font. Nevertheless, ... I only know of two freely available Unicode Tibetan fonts that support consonant-vowel stacks, and they both implement these by having a set of full-height consonants and a set of combining half-height consonants and combining vowel signs. This works OK for very simple Tibetan text, but the various combined elements interfer with each other when a stack has more than one subjoined consonant, or where (for example) a stack has a subjoined consonant and a subjoined vowel, with the result that complex stacks are unreadable with these fonts, and even simple stacks can be quite ugly. It may be that a more sophisticated implementation could position the combining elements correctly for any given stack to ensure that there is no interference (as well as select the appropriate ligatures for subjoined YA, vowel sign U, etc.), but I imagine that it would be just as much work to calculate the correct positioning for each element in every conceivable stack for combination at run-time as it would be to pre-compose the individual glyph elements within the font. I apologise if my analysis is naive, but I know that there are members of this list who have experience in creating Tibetan fonts, and perhaps they could better explain the mechanics of dealing with complex stacks. Andrew
