Peter Constable wrote: > >> then *any* font having a unicode cmap is a Unicode font. > > > >No, not if the glyps (for the "supported characters") are > >inappropriate for the characters given. > > Kent is quite right here. There are a *lot* of fonts out > there with Unicode > cmaps that do not at all conform to the Unicode standard --- > custom-encoded (some call them "hacked") fonts, usually abusing the > characters that make up Windows cp1252.
IMHO, you are confusing two very different things here: 1) Assigning arbitrary glyphs to some Unicode characters. E.g., assigning the "$" character to long S; the ASCII letters to Greek letters; the whole Latin-1 range to Devanagari characters, etc. 2) Choosing strange or unorthodox glyph variants for some Unicode characters. The "hacked fonts" you mention are case (1); what is being discussed in this thread is case (2). Like it or not, superscript e *is* the same diacritic that later become "¨", so there is absolutely no violation of the Unicode standard. Of course, this only applies German. The fact that umlaut and dieresis have been unified in Unicode, makes such a variant glyph only applicable to a font targeted to German. You could not use that font to, e.g., typeset English or French, because the "¨" in "coöperation" or "naïve" is a dieresis, not an umlaut sign. There are other cases out there of Unicode fonts suitable for Chinese but not Japanese, Italian but not Polish, Arabic but not Urdu, etc. Why should a Unicode font suitable for German but not for English be any worse? _ Marco
