- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:44:47 -0600
- To: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Cc: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>, www-style@w3.org
On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Thomas Phinney
<tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Just a terminology clarification, re "concern about exposing alternate
> glyphs":
>
> In font-speak, "alternate glyphs" means just about any glyph substitution
> built into the font which yields a different glyph or glyphs for the same
> underlying Unicode codepoint(s). Small caps, ligatures, real
> super/subscript, oldstyle figures... these are all different kinds of
> alternate glyphs.
>
> The phrase "alternate glyphs" in this write-up is clearly intended to refer
> to a small subset of these features which present a specific problem. Though
> it is not written here, based on previous discussion and a priori knowledge,
> I expect it refers specifically to the OpenType stylistic alternates
> ('salt') and stylistic sets ('ssXX') features.
If I recall correctly, that's precisely right. Setting alternate
glyphs to be used in a 'global' manner can easily interact badly with
fallback (as the new font can have *completely* different kinds of
stylistic alternates), thus the discussion about tying them to
specific faces through some mechanism.
~TJ
Received on Thursday, 12 November 2009 23:45:34 UTC