Re: Tech: Unicode (was...)

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> Thanks for information. I begin to see the whole thing a little clearer
> by now. I hope that in a near future all fonts provided on computers
> will be full-Unicode, so there wouldn't be any problems left
In fact, there would be.  Full-Unicode fonts are inevitably a
compromise, and don't suit the needs of typography as well as
more limited but detailed fonts.

1) No full-Unicode font with current technology can really be
*full* Unicode: the maximum number of glyphs (images) in a font
is 65535, and there are over 90,000 Unicode characters and still
growing.

2) For some characters, the best form depends on the language being
used.  Readers of Japanese are rather sensitive to the exact form
that Han characters take, even to the point of using Japanese-style
glyphs for Chinese quotations embedded in Japanese.  China and Korea
have rather different typographical traditions.  (Nota bene: I am
not talking about simplified vs. traditional characters, which *are*
distinct in Unicode).  A full-Unicode font is necessarily a compromise
between these traditions, and may look unnatural in any particular
language.

3) Similar things happen on a smaller scale even in the Latin script:
a traditional Polish "o" with acute has a shorter and steeper accent
than a Spanish one.  A universal font has to pick one or the other,
since Unicode has only one "o" with acute.

4) Devanagari characters are encoded in Unicode, but ligatures are
supplied by the font.  However, exactly which ligatures are usable and
which are not depends on the language: Sanskrit has many, Hindi rather
fewer, some minority languages only one or two.  To represent these
distinctions requires more than one Devanagari font.

The standard Microsoft fonts cover a Microsoft-specified subset of
Unicode called WGL4 (Windows Glyph List 4).  MS provides other fonts
for other scripts.

> (but I'm still expecting the keyboard to change automatically according
> to the alphabet used, which would be quite possible if, instead of
> being mechanical, it were conceived as a tactile screen. Oh no ! I
> told this great idea on the Web, and hence lost all the royalties I
> could have got if I had patented it).
Don't worry.  Xerox was supplying virtual keyboards on its multilingual
Star and ViewPoint workstations already in the 1980s.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
Heckler: "Go on, Al, tell 'em all you know.  It won't take long."
Al Smith: "I'll tell 'em all we *both* know.  It won't take any longer."

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