Notes on Mongolian variant forms

folks, fyi, i just finished extending the page
Notes on Mongolian variant forms
http://r12a.github.io/scripts/mongolian/variants
to cover all remaining characters in the Mongolian Unicode block.

the document compares variant glyph shapes proposed in three documents, 
and shows what shapes the following fonts produce: Mongolian Baiti, Noto 
Sans Mongolian, Mongolian White (+Writing, +Title, +Art).

if anyone wants to provide information about what glyphs are displayed 
by other fonts (the conflicts are all that are needed) i will try to add 
that information to the charts.

(more detailed description of the page in text follows below. See the 
page for links.)








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There is some confusion about which shapes should be produced by fonts 
for Mongolian characters. Most letters have at least one isolated, 
initial, medial and final shape, but other shapes are produced by 
contextual factors, such as vowel harmony.

Unicode has a list of standardised variant shapes, dating from 27 
November 2013, but that list is not complete and contains what are 
currently viewed by some as errors.

The original list of standardised variants was based on 蒙古文编码 by 
Professor Quejingzhabu in 2000.

A new proposal was published on 20 January 2014, which attempts to 
resolve the current issues.

The other factor in this is what the actual fonts do. Sometimes they 
follow the Unicode standardised variants list, other times they diverge 
from it. Occasionally a majority of implementations appear to diverge in 
the same way, suggesting that the standardised list should be adapted to 
reality.

In this document I map the changes between the various proposals, and 
compare to various font implementations.

Received on Thursday, 16 April 2015 10:44:55 UTC