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

On 08/03/08 08:24:26, David J. Peterson wrote:
>
> Tristan:
> <<
> Another problem is that Latin handwriting fonts can't
> use context-sensitive glyphs the way Arabic fonts do (for instance,
> my
> cursive p and b are open when a letter follows, but closed when they
> don't --- you can't tell an OpenType font to automatically do that).
>  >>
>
> Wow!  You can have a font do that?!  Whenever I typed in Arabic
> (or in my Megdevi font, inspired by Arabic), there were just four
> keys for every normal character: initial, medial, final, and stand-
> alone.
> If you wanted to type, you had to remember which key to use
> and decide for yourself where you were in a word.  If a font could
> do that on its own, so you only had to map the single letters without
> worrying about the forms...wow!
Oh yes certainly you can! In fact, the very existence of initial,
medial, final and stand-alone Arabic characters in Unicode is
considered to be for historical reasons only, and you should never want
to use them. I take a massive risk in trying to post Arabic UTF-8
characters on this listserv, but this *should* display properly, and
tmk it does for me. I'm pretty sure Apples have good enough support for
this sort of thing, too, so I'd expect it to work for you. (I don't
know any Arabic so I hope it's either gibberish or something
innocuous...)

حسم محس سمح

(That's HAH-SEEN-MEEM space MEEM-HAH-SEEN space SEEN-MEEM-HAH,
U+062D-U+0633-U+0645 U+0020 U+0645-U+062D-U+0633 U+0020
U+0633-U+0645-U+062D.)

--
Tristan.