Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
Philippe Verdy wrote on 07/20/2003 08:37:19 AM: What would be the purpose of encoding these? I can't think of any. They certainly don't need to be encoded as distinct characters to use in a Last Resort font. Mostly for documentation purpose Since Unicode is not a glyph encoding standard, there's no need for it to assign glyphs to codepoints for documentation purposes. - Peter --- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
At 23:34 +0200 2003-07-19, Philippe Verdy wrote: I'm still convinced that these glyphs are much more informative than a default glyph showing a ?, a white rectangle, or a black losange with a mirrored white ?... Of course they are. And Unicode also uses these glyphs in the index page for its charmaps, You mean for its charts. Please. but they are shown as poor bitmaps (may be the PDF or book version use your glyphs in a document-embedded font) That page is in HTML. How were your glyphs contributed? I, uh, drew them. With SVG graphics containing character objects and drawing primitives I have no idea what this means. I used Fontographer. (it seems the simplest way to derive them, using the table shown in Apple's web page, with some exceptions for unassigned, reserved, forbidden or surrogates symbols which require a distinct design)? You can't derive these. You have to draw them individually. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On Sunday, July 20, 2003 2:21 PM, Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: With SVG graphics containing character objects and drawing primitives I have no idea what this means. I used Fontographer. SVG is a W3C-promoted standard for Scalable Vector Graphics, based on a XML language, and allowing to describe vector graphics with 2D primitives, and it can be used to produce custom fonts of symbols, in a more appealing way than with bitmaps. A SVG graphic can be used at the source URL of an img / or object / element within HTML. Most vectorial graphic tool can generate or conert their proprietary format with SVG, used as a lingua franca for vector graphics interchanges (deprecating legacy proprietary formats like MacDraw and WMF, or the many other formats created by every drawing tool on the market). SVG graphics are now very popular and recognized by many publishing layout engines, and they are great for many websites that wish to compute and generate dynamic graphics (because these graphics can be updated online with its DOM tree, and easily generated from templates by XSLT processors). The palette of SVG primitives is rich and includes many presentation features (including colors, shading, transparency effects, regions combining operators). Recent versions of MS-Office use SVG within their new XML document format to embed graphics, or presentation effects, without the limitations of HTML. When I look at the Apple's Developer page, all what I see in the table of glyphs and in the description can be represented with a SVG graphic, including Unicode-encoded text primitives for the representative glyph chosen in their table. In a first approach, each defined PostScript name can be bound to a SVG filename, and a font can be made from it, by packing all these SVG in a ZIP archive, which can also contain description tables. Then any font format can be derived from this editable format.
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
Philippe Verdy wrote on 07/19/2003 01:24:48 PM: Isn't this page creating the idea for a specific block of script-representative glyphs, that could be mapped in plane 14 as special supplementary characters ? What would be the purpose of encoding these? I can't think of any. They certainly don't need to be encoded as distinct characters to use in a Last Resort font. - Peter --- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On Sunday, July 20, 2003 3:20 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Philippe Verdy wrote on 07/19/2003 01:24:48 PM: Isn't this page creating the idea for a specific block of script-representative glyphs, that could be mapped in plane 14 as special supplementary characters ? What would be the purpose of encoding these? I can't think of any. They certainly don't need to be encoded as distinct characters to use in a Last Resort font. Mostly for documentation purpose, but also in most system that want to be more informative to users missing a font for a particular script. Michael also judged it to be useful enough to create such a font for Apple, and Apple thought it would be useful for its Mac users. From usefulness comes the use, and thus some legitimacy to encode it within text, as special symbols that should not be represented as the normal glyph, but with these symbols. It's also a fact that these symbols are used (as bitmaps) in the online Unicode charts (not charmaps, sorry for the wrong term), and probably with the Michael's custom font in the published Unicode book. It's true that one can make a documentation without actually using a font with assigned codepoints for them. (A collection of SVG graphic could work for publishing purposes). But editing the cmap of a TrueType font to include all possible codepoints would require to map all the 17 planes in the cmap, and unless the cmap is compressed, this would require 1,114,112 mappings, or more than 2MB only for the cmap. This is probably too much for a default font, even if the system uses paging to access this TrueType font. In fact, a font with only the single glyphs ordered by allocation date for the corresponding block, and an extra table with a a cmap-like table using ranges of codepoints instead of simple entries would probably make things better (of course this would be an extension to the standard tables used by classic fonts). Without such TTF extension, it would be simpler to map only surrogates, and thus use only 128KB for a UTF-16 based cmap. I don't know the internals of the OpenType format, may be such compressed format for internal tables already exists that allows representing ranges, or there is space with table IDs allowed for application-specific custom tables.
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
At 08:20 -0500 2003-07-20, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What would be the purpose of encoding these? I can't think of any. They certainly don't need to be encoded as distinct characters to use in a Last Resort font. I am certain more people want to interchange the LITTER DUDE than would want to interchange script block indicators. (Ken suggested offline that this name might be better-received than the DO NOT LITTER SIGN) -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On Saturday, July 19, 2003, at 1:15 PM, Michael Everson wrote: So fonts containing these glyphs could be designed to display these glyphs, in a way similar to the current assignment of control pictures. Um, that's what the Last Resort font does, outside of Unicode encoding space. (I don't think PUA characters are used, actually, but I could be wrong. No, it uses the acutal Unicode characters, and just has a huge cmap that maps everything in Unicode to the glyph for its block. == John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On Sunday, July 20, 2003, at 7:37 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote: Mostly for documentation purpose, but also in most system that want to be more informative to users missing a font for a particular script. Michael also judged it to be useful enough to create such a font for Apple, and Apple thought it would be useful for its Mac users. Er, no. Apple thought it would be useful for its Mac users and commissioned Michael to make glyphs. (And I personally think he's done an excellent job.) == John H. Jenkins [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
What would be the purpose of encoding these? I can't think of any. They certainly don't need to be encoded as distinct characters to use in a Last Resort font. Mostly for documentation purpose, Why bother to encode them as distinct characters? For purposes of documentation isn't a good reason to encode these things, which are simply a set of fall-back glyphs for user convenience to show what isn't installed! If you want documentation for the Last Resort font, just make documentation (or ask Apple to make some). Rick
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
At 09:56 -0600 2003-07-20, John H. Jenkins wrote: No, it uses the acutal Unicode characters, and just has a huge cmap that maps everything in Unicode to the glyph for its block. That is just so cool. :-) -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On 20/07/2003 06:20, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Philippe Verdy wrote on 07/19/2003 01:24:48 PM: Isn't this page creating the idea for a specific block of script-representative glyphs, that could be mapped in plane 14 as special supplementary characters ? What would be the purpose of encoding these? I can't think of any. They certainly don't need to be encoded as distinct characters to use in a Last Resort font. - Peter One good reason would be so that a page like http://www.unicode.org/charts/ can be represented without having to use lots of .gifs, so for efficiency, searchability etc. Which is pretty much the same reason for defining any Unicode characters at all, given that documents and web pages can always be created, though inefficiently and unsearchably, from lots of images. -- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~peterkirk/
Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On Saturday, July 19, 2003 1:55 PM, Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hm. See http://developer.apple.com/fonts/LastResortFont/ where it shows glyphs for illegal characters (FFFE/ etc.) as well as undefined characters (valid code positions which have not been assigned). I thought somehow that there was a glyph for broken characters (characters that were just plain wrong) as well. Isn't this page creating the idea for a specific block of script-representative glyphs, that could be mapped in plane 14 as special supplementary characters ? If the estimated number of Unicode blocks is expected to be under 1024, this block would use one special character to represent the glyph, i.e. not a control character, but a symbol representative of each assigned Unicode block. If such assignment is not easy to estimate now, glyphs for scripts should be assigned in the order of their definition in successive versions of Unicode). So fonts containing these glyphs could be designed to display these glyphs, in a way similar to the current assignment of control pictures. This page already gives the names of the characters according to the official names of scripts, but a more uniform name than the Postscript name could be used, such as: UNASSIGNED BLOCK SYMBOL, UNASSIGNED CHARACTER SYMBOL, ILLEGAL CHARACTER SYMBOL, then... BASIC LATIN SCRIPT SYMBOL, EXTENDED LATIN 1 SCRIPT SYMBOL, ... By itself, this Apple Developers page is nearly the base for such proposal. If needed, the Unicode blocks.txt could specify additional columns to specify the assignment of each script block, with special entries for the symbol used to represent unassigned characters in assigned blocks, or unassigned blocks. -- Philippe. Spams non tolérés: tout message non sollicité sera rapporté à vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
At 20:24 +0200 2003-07-19, Philippe Verdy wrote: Isn't this page creating the idea for a specific block of script-representative glyphs, that could be mapped in plane 14 as special supplementary characters ? Good heavens, no. It's one thing for me to update this font regularly for Apple when new blocks get added to the standard. It's quite another thing to suggest that we should have to add, formally, a new block symbol to some block in Plane 14 every time we add a new block to the standard. Isn't it? Surely the correct thing to do is to implement Last Resort support for different platforms as Apple indicates using those character names. So fonts containing these glyphs could be designed to display these glyphs, in a way similar to the current assignment of control pictures. Um, that's what the Last Resort font does, outside of Unicode encoding space. (I don't think PUA characters are used, actually, but I could be wrong. -- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
On Saturday, July 19, 2003 9:15 PM, Michael Everson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So fonts containing these glyphs could be designed to display these glyphs, in a way similar to the current assignment of control pictures. Um, that's what the Last Resort font does, outside of Unicode encoding space. (I don't think PUA characters are used, actually, but I could be wrong. I see that Apple maps it to a PostScript dictionary namespace, but this seems limitative for the implementation, when almost all foundries are converting now their Type1 fonts to OpenType, which is much more efficient, but still requires some entry point with a numeric assignment (a glyph ID will still require an input codepoint to seek relevant glyphs, and a PUA still requires a table of conversion from ranges to that font-specific PUA, and a TrueType font not marked as Unicode compatible would use direct glyph IDs from a externally defined character set similar to legacy charsets, except that they can't be mapped to Unicode). I'm still convinced that these glyphs are much more informative than a default glyph showing a ?, a white rectangle, or a black losange with a mirrored white ?... And Unicode also uses these glyphs in the index page for its charmaps, but they are shown as poor bitmaps (may be the PDF or book version use your glyphs in a document-embedded font) How were your glyphs contributed? With SVG graphics containing character objects and drawing primitives (it seems the simplest way to derive them, using the table shown in Apple's web page, with some exceptions for unassigned, reserved, forbidden or surrogates symbols which require a distinct design)? -- Philippe. Spams non tolérés: tout message non sollicité sera rapporté à vos fournisseurs de services Internet.
Re: Last Resort Glyphs (was: About the European MES-2 subset)
Apple's version of the Last Resort font is a (relatively) normal font. It just has a cmap that maps lots and lots of characters to the same glyph. :-) Deborah Goldsmith Manager, Fonts / Unicode Liaison Apple Computer, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Saturday, July 19, 2003, at 12:15 PM, Michael Everson wrote: Um, that's what the Last Resort font does, outside of Unicode encoding space. (I don't think PUA characters are used, actually, but I could be wrong.
