Dean Snyder wrote:
Peter Constable wrote at 10:42 AM on Tuesday, May 25, 2004:
Let's say that you have adequately demonstrated that Fraktur text is not
legible to most Latin speakers. (This can be disputed since there is
some measure of legibility -- all of your subjects did recognize some
portions of the text. But I'll assume it's demonstrated.) All that this
demonstrates is that *glyphs* may not be recognizable. It does not
demonstrate that characters are distinct. For *any* script, one can
create glyphs that the average user of the script will find illegible.
I've seen Thai typefaces that I certainly had difficulty reading, but
that does not mean that the characters are not Thai. The point is that
*some* people can read such text, and they recognize those characters as
Thai, or Latin in the case of Fraktur.
This, in fact, is an important reason why I chose to use a set of glyphs
published as representative glyphs in the Unicode Standard; I did not go
out fishing for some obscure font.
Glyphs shapes in the Unicode Standard are not considered normative (though they may be for mathematical typesetting [?]) - and do not necessarily represent their most readable form. Compare: http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/fraktur.htm
Fraktur comes from a Latin word meaning broken / fractured - it is not surprising that "broken" letters are difficult to read.
Fraktur and other Blackletter type faces were originally based on elaborate calligraphy - and some elaborate calligraphic forms of many scripts can be difficult to read - but this doesn't make them separate scripts in the sense of that word used by iso10646 and Unicode.
- Chris
