Re: [css3-fonts] humane 'unicode-range'

  
Christoph Päper wrote:

> Would it make sense to add keywords to ‘unicode-range’ or to add
> another font-decriptor with similar purpose to identify scripts or
> writing systems (i.e. script + language) supported by (and requested
> to be used from) the font resource? 

There was a discussion of this last year:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2009May/0212.html

I think it boiled down to whether to use names from the Unicode
database or not and if so, how specific the names should be.  I think
the idea of named ranges for the 'unicode-range' descriptor is interesting.
I don't like the idea of additional descriptors for this (e.g. script-coverage, etc.).

It would help to have a clearer idea of the use case you imagine for this
to be able to judge whether named ranges are better than simple ranges.

One other use I can imagine is for easily dividing up large CJK fonts into defined
character ranges.

Ex: 

  unicode-range: jis-level-1, jis-level-2; /* alias for the set of codepoints in the JIS Level 1 and 2 ranges */

JIS Level 1 characters occur more commonly than JIS Level 2, etc., so
this would be a convenient way for font vendors to package fonts so that
fonts containing infrequently used characters were only downloaded in
fallback situations.
 
No matter what the set of aliases, I think we can only practically
reference ranges that are defined clearly and have a standard reference
point such as the Unicode database.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Thursday, 17 June 2010 09:06:16 UTC