C J Fynn <cfynn at gmx dot net> wrote: > "Philippe Verdy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Certainly, but what is the distinction between downloading/ >> distributing a font or downloading/ditributing a XML file containing >> the PUA conventions? > > One file not two - and some assurance that the custom properties > haven't been altered since the font and the document that uses it were > created.
I didn't see Philippe's original post, of course, for reasons that many list members will remember. But this response from Chris piqued my curiosity. So I went digging into my "Deleted Items" folder, found the relevant post from Philippe, and guess what? A miracle happened. I AGREE WITH PHILIPPE. That is, if there is ever to be a mechanism for specifying properties of PUA characters at the user level (Mark Davis' expectation notwithstanding), I agree that it should live in an external file or table or other data structure, not within a font. And XML would be a perfectly suitable format for distributing such a property file. Not all font formats, not even all "smart" font formats, can contain all of the property information for every character the font supports. OpenType/Uniscribe was mentioned as an example where the rendering engine does work that would be done by the font in other systems. The division of labor between font and engine isn't the same across systems. And even if you can tell the font about the directionality and default-ignorability of your characters, there are still issues like line breaking and mirroring (and maybe others, or maybe those are bad examples) that have to be handled outside the font anyway. Putting all the property information inside the font forces the user to use *only that font* for his PUA needs. There might be a choice of fonts that support a particular PUA usage (such as for Klingon -- Mark Shoulson, is this true?) and it would not make sense to require all of these fonts to be updated to include property information (if that is even possible). Better to store the property information separately and make it work for any old font the user chooses. Storing the custom properties in the font doesn't really provide any assurance that they haven't been altered. If astonishing events like this continue, I may have to consider taking Philippe off my "Blocked Senders" list and re-evaluating the signal-to-noise ratio of his posts. (Of course, all is not perfect here -- we need to be careful to use U+100001 for our PUA examples, not U+10001, which is an assigned Linear B character. Count your zeros carefully!) -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
