E. Keown <k underscore isoetc at yahoo dot com> wrote:
Supposedly this list has >600 people.
> Just of curiosity, how many of you are NOT font designers?
Maybe I'm being a bit cynical (the election wasn't that long ago, after all), but I have to wonder what the motivation is for asking this question.
Alas, it's about me, Doug. The reason, as far as I can see, is that Ms Keown has taken it into her head that I (for instance) who am not a Semiticist, am nothing more than a font designer, and that my ability to design fonts is the only reason I believe that the Phoenician script (and the family of related scripts unified with it) is a different script from Square Hebrew.
This is, of course, not true. While I do design fonts, my expertise is in the analysis and encoding of writing systems. Many other experts in writing systems also participate in this work and on this forum.
It has been explained to Ms Keown that the Universal Character Set, being universal, must meet the needs of a wide range of users, and that a unification of Phoenician with Square Hebrew would not meet such needs. I have, many times, tried to explain on this forum that we are using a historical taxonomy of writing systems, and intend to encode what I call "significant nodes" of the script-tree. The roadmap tends to reflect this. We do not have a thesis prepared which will answer every question anyone might have, but the proposal and documents for Phoenician in particular show clearly the reasons why it is not unified with Hebrew.
Ms Keown wants to try to continue to fight against the encoding of Phoenician, and for some reason she believes that knowing whether or not "font designers" support its encoding will assist her.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
