RE: @font-face and unicode-range

>From: Michael Day
>
>Using script values sounds like a great idea! That's a lot easier for 
>the user than specifying a dozen Unicode blocks, and it also handles
the 
>common and inherited characters, which unicode-range currently can't
do.
>
>(It's also nice from an efficiency point of view, as we already have 
>perform script processing in order to correctly apply OpenType
features, 
>so it is no extra work at all).
>
>So, how about allowing unicode-range to accept Unicode script names?
And 
>should these be strings or keywords? :)

Hi Michael,
For the names if you looked at the Unicode UAX#24 (latest is
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24/tr24-11.html you'll see that you can
either use the long names (such as Cyrillic) or short 4 letters names
(such as Cyrl), ref the sc entries in
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/PropertyValueAliases.txt 
I guess the 4 letters are more like keywords, while the long names are
more like strings.

Because the script value is unique for each Unicode character, a script
set is equivalent to a set of Unicode ranges, so they could be used
interchangeably with Unicode ranges in the syntax.

The problem though occurs with the Inherited and Common sets, although
they are required for many writing systems, you would not expect a font
to contain all of them. In fact you would only expect a subset required
to support the other scripts specified by a given font.

In other words, you would explicit declare a set of scripts in the
@font-face syntax, and make sure your font implicitly contains the
appropriate set of Common and Inherited characters to adequately
represent the writing systems covered by a given script (or set of
scripts). This requires some detailed analysis.

Michel

Received on Wednesday, 3 June 2009 05:10:49 UTC