Deborah Goldsmith wrote at 1:20 PM on Wednesday, February 4, 2004: >On Feb 2, 2004, at 9:20 PM, Dean Snyder wrote: >> I hope Apple re-thinks this, because it makes PUA useless in plain >> text. > >Doing font substitution on PUA code points was causing problems, >because we have found a lot of fonts have garbage entries in their >cmaps in the PUA, due to the implementation details of certain >font-editing applications (which use the PUA part of the cmap as a >"scratch" area).
Did this cause real problems for users? >The system was basically picking a random font in many >cases. Rather than have a font substitution mechanism that picks a >random font, we disabled font substitution for PUA characters. But I suggest that that "randomness" can actually be controlled by users - by font installation or code point re-assignment. >I agree this causes problems for things like file names in the Finder, >but I worry whether that is an appropriate use of PUA characters. When >Cuneiform is encoded, all these file names will have to be reentered. I only use them locally and it's a trivial code snippet to automatically change them when cuneiform gets encoded, or even when going through different iterations of the repertoire as it approaches final status. By the way I only used the Finder file graphic because I thought it made a more dramatic picture. The real issue is in plain text content where I want to specify a monospaced font like Courier for Roman text and expect a proportional PUA cuneiform font for interspersed cuneiform. If I set the plain text file to the cuneiform font, I don't get to choose the font for Roman. See the attached image of an application I use to work on the cuneiform repertoire. It was much nicer when I could see the actual cuneiform signs in the sign column of the array ;-) And indeed, it's useless right now for some work. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
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