Re: glyph selection for Unicode in browsers

Peter Constable wrote,

> >Once the font specs for all this are set and fonts are released with
> >the necessary coverage and the shaping engines can access all of this,
> >the browsers are sure to quickly add support, too.
> 
> I'm not quite as optimistic in terms of how close we are to having all this
> ready to go. I think there's some hard work still ahead.
> 

Oh, certainly.  There's always hard work still ahead, it seems.

A possible option for dealing with language specific font selection would
be to enhance the user font preference options in browsers to include "lang"
font assignments under the existing script assignments.  To assist users
in setting up such preferences, perhaps some kind of font information
registry could be collected and published in order to avoid the duplication
of effort which would be required if every user had to separately contact
the various font developers asking about language suitability.  I'd expect
this kind of user preference option to be under "advanced" settings...

Or, perhaps this degree of font selection could be handled at the HTML/XML
authoring tool level.  In other words, an author could set up "lang" tag
preferences once, and then the tool could automatically set up CSS with
appropriate font selection information based upon the "lang" tags used in
the document.

Or, the browser folks themselves could maintain an internal listing of
"lang" tags and suitable fonts and apply them invisibly as default if
no other font is selected.

Of course, this still would mean much hard work ahead, but it would shift
the burden from OpenType developers to browser developers.  (smile)

Best regards,

James Kass.

Received on Sunday, 29 September 2002 11:57:36 UTC