RE: [OpenType] Proposal: Ligatures w/ ZWJ in OpenType

[asmusf]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002 18:23:57 -0500 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

Let's forget for a moment whether we're interested in ZWJ or ZWNJ. What do
you recommend to be the default behaviour with German text in the context
of software that has no particular knowledge of German typography and a
user that doesn't know to enter any control characters? (Let's suppose that
a font can have German-specific rules, but not the software.) Would you
rather have ligatures appear everywhere they would if English (say) had
been assumed, resulting in ligatures in inappropriate places, or would you
rather have ligatures nowhere, resulting in less elegant typography but
also no errors?

** Having 'elegant' typography that is incorrect is not 'elegant' it is
wrong. The only choice that users have today is to disable ligatures, or to
manually use markup (where available) to disable ligatures where they are
incorrect. Actually I suspect that placing a SHY will result in the 'correct'
output for many existing implementations, as the forbidden places are internal
word boundaries.

** What is needed is a consistent recommendation by the font community, based
on the recommendation by Unicode, to allow text to be coded in a portable way,
so that ligatures can be supported with overall on/off to select typography
and spelling can be handled by characters - possibly supplied by a nice piece
of lookup software in the spell checker.

A./

RE: Inappropriate Proposals FAQ

[asmusf]

I would like to once again suggest that we refocus this 'FAQ' 

AWAY from a repetition of the Principles and Procedures document maintained
by WG2 and containing the explanation of what constitutes a valid *formal*
proposal.

AWAY from any attempt to cover *all* aspects that could make a proposal
inappropriate, and away from any schema for a complete classification of the
universe of possible proposals.

TOWARDS a set of a few -easily understood and not contentious- examples of
things that have been ruled out of bounds - with a clear pointer to the formal
document with its typology of scripts. (By all means, point prominently to the
roadmap as well).

Doing anything else will take a lot of work, both initially and in constantly
tweaking it; cause a lot of confusion (if it contains many items that are in
fact in a gray zone) and can weaken our understanding of which set of 'rules'
are the ones we really operate under.

A./

On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 23:24:01 +0100 Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:

I would NOT like to see our committees' hands tied by taking this 
list as more than guidelines. I understand that it is for an FAQ but 
there should be text therein to emphasize that these are not binding.