Re: Conlang Unicode Font (was Re: Kamakawi Unicode Font Question)

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:58 AM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
>  (2) My understand is that these ligature characters don't work
>  the way you want them to.  For example, on a Mac, I can "add"
>  an acute accent to an "e", but all I'm really doing is typing in a
>  code that tells the computer to display the "e-acute" cell.  The
>  glyphs you have that display over glyphs already typed should
>  work, but I don't *think* Unicode is supposed to be used to,
>  say, type an "n", and then type a "g", and then have it automatically
>  produce an "ng" ligature.
No, as I understand it, that's not a Unicode issue; you're right.

But it *is* a rendering issue. There are languages which might want to
create certain ligatures, either obligatorily (think Arabic contextual
forms) or optionally (think Latin-script f-i or f-l ligatures).

Unicode doesn't have a position, especially on the latter, and the
separate ligature glyphs don't need a Unicode codepoint. (They do have
to be in the font, though, I think.)

Consider also Devanagari ligatures: Unicode does not include all the
ligatures as separate *characters*, but fonts are free to create
*glyphs* to provide high-quality text rendering (rather than simply
using "half-letter" shapes in all cases, or - even worse - explicitly
using virama all over the place in the rendered result, even if that's
the way to encode it in the underlying codepoints). I even seem to
recall reading in the Unicode standard that a good Indic font will
have to have many more glyphs than there are codepoints in the Indic
blocks.

>  I've installed the test version of the font on my machine, and
>  it doesn't seem to be working.  That is, I tested out one glyph
>  by putting it on a webpage.  I have unicode encoding up; the
>  glyph is at codepoint F072; I typed & # x F 0 7 2 ; onto the
>  page (no spaces); I have the font installed; I opened up the
>  webpage, and I get a square box.  Have I missed a step?
What browser are you using?

MSIE, for exampe, is said to be bad at using a fallback font; if the
character is not in the font it thinks is needed, you'll get a box or
a question mark or something.

If so, consider either explicitly specifying the font (either in the
IE settings or in the web page via CSS or HTML), or using Firefox or
another browser that does font fallback better.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>