C J Fynn wrote on 3/3/2004, 11:41 AM:
> Frank Yung-Fong Tang wrote: > > > And I am sure the following DOES NOT exist although I hope there > > we can have one day- Glyph Encoding Standard. Map a glyph to > > a fixed glyph ID. (The Arabic presentation block A and B sort of > > like this one) For example, it will be much easier for people to > > understand the Indic font if there a INFOS glyph mapping standard > > for all their indic fonts. > > The font formats that Bob mentioned > OpenType from Microsoft & Adobe > GX and AAT from Apple > SIL Graphite from SIL > > are desined to *get away* from this kind of thing > > A Glyph Encoding Standard like Frank suggests is just encoding glyphs > as characters once removed or by the back door. It ony makes any sense > for scripts that never have complex or contextual shaping requirements. > > Certainly not Arabic or Indic scripts. > > - Chris Surely I understand these technology are there to "get away" those kind of thing. The thing I do not understand is why can't those thing EVER been standalized. I can understand that we may not be able to standardlized it as today, due to lack of fully understand all the possible combination and different typographic design choose. However, there are no reason it is not a unreachable goal. And even today, it is possible to standardalized some of the glaph encoding, without standardlized the character to glyph mapping. For example, we can standarlized a set of Arabic glyphs with their encoding. Ok... someone will say, what will happen if we need to add additional Arabic "like" glyph for minority Arabic dialect? Will, add extension to it. Since the glyph encoding standard itself do not decide how to map from characters to glyph, you can change that part to use additional ligural glyph or newly added characters, etc. Also, for those "simple script" the glyph encoding SHOULD be standarlized as today.
