Re: Additional diacritics (was: Phonological equivalent of...)

On 11/02/07, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:

(a vs ɑ)
> I understand that if two glyphs are just variant representations of
> one character, Unicode leaves the representation up to the font
> itself; but with script vs. print <a>, they seem to be clearly two
> different *characters* with different functions within IPA. (After
> all, if they weren't, we wouldn't even have the script <a> character.)
Yes, but there *are* two different characters: a and ɑ. Just because
you are using a font that is inappropriate to the task (i.e. doesn't
show the two characters as different, even tho you want to see a
difference) doesn't mean Unicode should confuse matters by adding an
extra character. There's two different glyphs — there's two different
characters — there's 2^2 possible mappings; you've just got to choose
a font that uses the mapping you want.

As an example: Imagine you had a font that didn't distinguish between
u and v, say intended for use in period-style reproductions of
early-modern era documents. Using the advanced typographical features
of OpenType, it picks a glyph that looks like v at the beginning of
words, and uses a u-like glyph elsewhere in the word, regardless of
which character is recorded. Your request would be like requesting
that Unicode add two extra characters, u-always-u and v-always-v,
because you want to use this font in a business document. Obviously,
tho, you simply don't use this font for that purpose.

...
> What was the original rationale for the <g> used in IPA? I'm glad to
> hear that we can now use a "normal" <g>.
That's actually been the case since the current revision was first
released in 1993 I think. I don't know why; I've heard it's because
they wanted glyphs to have a single form, but that doesn't explain why
they didn't choose the more common one...

> (I forgot to mention, also, that <ae> ligature and <oe> ligature in
> this font look indistinguishable at normal size, although if I zoom
> in far enough I can see a slight difference. I've also seen that in
> italics in printed text. Perhaps I should change my font, but
> otherwise I really like this one.)
Well, you could always get a font editor and change your font :) (To
pre-empt an obvious question, I use FontForge on GNU/Linux, but I've
got no idea if that runs on Mac OS or what alternatives a Mac user
has.)

--
Tristan.