Thank you for your reply.
On Wednesday 4 August 2010, Karl Pentzlin <[email protected]> wrote:
> WO> Why is it not possible specifically to request a one-storey form of
> lowercase letter a?
>
> I did not this, as I do not know a cultural context where the two-storey form
> is to be suppressed to prevent an "a" to be mistaken for any letter too
> similar to a two-storey a.
Well, I was intending this as a straightforward way to access glyph alternates.
Noticing that you mentioned cultural context, I have now remembered a situation
that might perhaps be of interest.
It was in a thread about fonts for teaching children in the United Kingdom how
to read and write.
http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=296
> WO> What happens in relation to a character such as g circumflex? Would one
> be able to access a glyph alternate for g circumflex?
>
> The variant selector can be followed by any diacritic which then is applied
> to the base character.
Yet what if one wants to use the precomposed g circumflex character?
> WO> Could there be variants for lowercase e, ...
>
> I have found none, which of course is no proof of
> non-existence,
>
> WO> for a horizontal line glyph design, and for an
> angled line,
>
> Not according to the principles outlined in my proposal,
>
> WO> Venetian-style font, glyph design please?
>
> No.
I was looking for a way to access a glyph alternate for typography, not for any
cultural meaning. Maybe one might choose to use an e with an angled line in the
words Venice and Venetian, for subtle effect in the typography. I find that
adding alternate glyphs to fonts is a modern trend. There seems no current way
to access them from plain text.
> WO> Would it be possible to define U+FE15 VARIATION SELECTOR-16 to indicate
> an end of word alternate glyph for each lowercase Latin character?
>
> No. Even if you find a cultural context where such things are required, such
> things are positional variants which are to be handled by the proven
> mechanisms developed for scripts like Arabic.
I am thinking of where a poet might specify an ending version of a glyph at the
end of the last word on some lines, yet not on others, for poetic effect. I
think that it would be good if one could specify that in plain text.
William Overington
5 August 2010
