Doug Ewell 於 2011年8月22日 上午10:59 寫道:

> Petr Tomasek <tomasek at etf dot cuni dot cz> wrote:
> 
>>> Some PUA properties, like glyph shapes and maybe directionality, can
>>> be stored in a font.  Others, like numeric values and casing, might
>>> not or cannot.  An interchangeable format needs to be agreed upon for
>> 
>> Why not?
> 
> Where does one store numeric values in a font?  Maybe this should be
> taken off-list.
> 


This is actually a relevant point.  The major TrueType variants all work 
primarily with glyphs, not characters.  Using them as a place to store 
information about the *characters* in the text is therefore not a reliable way 
to provide an override for default system behavior.  By the time the rendering 
engine consults the fonts for layout specifics, large chunks of the text 
processing will already be completed.  

OpenType, for example, expects that the bidi algorithm is largely run in 
character space, not glyph space, and therefore without regard for the specific 
font involved.  (AAT does almost everything in glyph space, including bidi.  
I'm not sure about Graphite.)  

The net result is that a font is an unreliable way of storing 
character-specific information useful on multiple platforms.  This is one 
reason why embedding the existing directionality controls within the text 
itself is currently the most reliable way of getting the behavior one might 
want in a platform-agnostic way.

=====
Siôn ap-Rhisiart
John H. Jenkins
jenk...@apple.com




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