On Wednesday 4 August 2010, Asmus Freytag <[email protected]> wrote:
> However, there's no need to add variation sequences to
> select an *ambiguous* form. Those sequences should be
> removed from the proposal.
Are you here talking about such things as alternate glyph styles?
It depends what one means by "need".
Adding alternate glyphs to a font is a trend in modern font design.
One approach is to use Private Use Area mappings, which can be used to produce
stylish hardcopy printouts and stylish graphics for the web, yet there are the
well-known problems of spell-checking and so on if Private Use Area mappings
are used for much more than those application areas.
The other approach is to use an alternate glyph model, where the underlying
plain text is conserved. However, this, today, often means using expensive
software packages with a proprietary file format in order to store the
information about which glyph to use in each case.
I remember those advertisements that CNN used to run promoting the concept of
advertising. Advertising - your right to choose. One of the advertisements
distinguished between what people need and what people want.
So, maybe people do not "need" to use alternate glyphs in typography, yet maybe
they "want" to do so, maybe they "enjoy" doing so.
I feel that it is entirely reasonable that Unicode and ISO 10646 encode things
that help people do what they want to do and what they enjoy doing as well as
what they need to do.
William Overington
5 August 2010
