Re: TECH: Fonts (was Re: Various)

Charles scripsit:

> But I have some very dumb basic questions:
> How many of these alphabets, syllabaries, etc,
> would work as a series of simply-abutted images?
None of them, technically, because of the presence of
combining diacritical marks in Unicode.  But the
Western alphabets work fine, and so does CJK
(Chinese/Japanese/Korean).  Ethiopic (not yet in the charts)
and Cherokee, too, and Hebrew if you have RTL support.

The hard scripts are the Indic ones, Arabic, Syriac, and
Thaana (not yet on the charts).

> That is
> *not* the appropriate road for unicode to take.
Remember that Unicode is a character standard, not a
font standard.  Its analogues are ASCII and Latin-1.

> If unicode is going to say "let them eat cake",
> we should burn down all their palaces, etc etc.
Unicode wants every culture to do it their own way.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin