Re: New work on fonts at W3C

2009/6/23 Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>:
> On Jun 23, 2009, at 3:25 PM, "Levantovsky, Vladimir"
> <Vladimir.Levantovsky@MonotypeImaging.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> Applying Unicode-range that encompasses a complete character set for a
>> certain language is one thing, but using a selective, non-consecutive
>> set of Unicode code-points is something completely different. I wonder
>> if anyone actually tried doing this. I might work for languages where
>> each character has a unique one-to-one mapping to a single glyph, but
>> even then things like kerning will get broken.
>
> I don't know, but I thout it would be a fairly common use case, such as
> using the numbers from a different font or substituting a single missing
> character from another font. It seems like something that would need to work
> right for Unicode ranges to fulfil their promise.

I'd say Vladimir is totally right that kerning will get broken even if
we stay within the confines of Latin languages. Kerning simply isn't
defined across fonts. We obviously are considering this to have better
typography, and if we do such things (font splitting) it will be
literally "[going] to such a great length and make extra efforts in
handling fonts"; I would even say it's abuse, or at least might be
seen as an encouragement to future abuse.

And if we talk about more complicated languages like Arabic, font
splitting would be hopeless because ligatures will be contextual. This
simply isn't in the same category as either font renaming or font
wrappers.
-- 
cheers,
-ambrose

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 01:53:25 UTC