Re: Character identities

[John Hudson]

At 18:37 10/28/2002, Doug Ewell wrote:

It seems to me, as a non-font guy, that calling a font a "Unicode font"
implies two things:

1.  It must be based on Unicode code points.  For True- and OpenType
fonts, this implies a Unicode cmap; for other font technologies it
implies some more-or-less equivalent mechanism.  The point is that
glyphs must be associated with Unicode code points (not necessarily
1-to-1, of course), not merely with an internal 8-bit table that can be
mapped to Unicode only through some other piece of software.

My only ammendment to that would be:

'The point is that those glyphs that are intended to represent the default form of the characters supported by that font must be associated with Unicode codepoints, whether directly or indirectly, not merely...'

Not every glyph in a font needs to be encoded, and in general glyph variants and things like ligatures should not be, unless standard Unicode codepoints happen to be available for them (even then, it would be legitimate to leave them unencoded and access them only via glyph processing features).

2.  The glyphs must reflect the "essential characteristics" of the
Unicode character to which they are mapped.  That means a capital A can
be bold, italic, script, sans-serif, etc.  A small a can also be
small-caps (or even full-size caps), but I think this is the only
controversial point.

Yes, I would agree with that, with the caveat that the A-ness of an A isn't necessarily something that can be defined: it can only be recognised.

Of course, the term "Unicode font" is also often used to mean "a font
that covers all, or nearly all, of Unicode."  Font technologies
generally don't even allow this, of course, and even by the standards of
"nearly" we are still limiting ourselves to things like Bitstream
Cyberbit, Arial Unicode MS, Code2000, Cardo, etc.  Right or wrong, this
is a commonly accepted meaning for "Unicode font."

I really think we should all do what we can to bury this use of the term. It is singularly unhelpful, and the idea in the minds of some customers that they *need* a font that covers all of Unicode has not done anyone any good. Sure some font developers made some money making these ridiculously huge grab-bag fonts, but their time could have been much better spent.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]

It is necessary that by all means and cunning,
the cursed owners of books should be persuaded
to make them available to us, either by argument
or by force. - Michael Apostolis, 1467