On Tue, 17 Dec 2002 08:45:05 -0800 (PST), Jungshik Shin wrote: > Is there any opentype/AAT font for Tibetan? Do Uniscribe, Pango, > ATSUI, and Graphite support them if there are opentype Tibetan fonts? > In addition to the principle of character encoding, the best practical > counterargument would come from a demonstration that Unicode encoding > model for Tibetan script does work in practice.
I have a Tibetan test page (http://uk.geocities.com/BabelStone1357/Test/Tibetan.html) that encodes a number of Tibetan texts in a variety of different styles using Unicode. At present the only freely available OpenType Tibetan font is the "Tibetan Uchen" font being developed by Tashi Tsering - a working version is available for download from http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~tt3e/files/Research.html. This displays "native" Tibetan (i.e. no unusual or complex Sankrit stacks) passably well, but is still quite primitive. However, expect some professional quality Tibetan OpenType fonts that cover all naturally occuring Tibetan stack combinations to be released soon. The Unicode model for encoding Tibetan does work in practice, and providing pre-composed forms adds no value to Tibetan users whatsoever - it takes the same effort to type in or otherwise select the syllable "skyi", for example, whether its encoded as a single character (Chinese proposal U+A54C) or four characters (U+0F66, U+0F90, U+0FB1, U+0F72). The Chinese proposal seems to suggest that the main reason for encoding the precomposed forms is that existing Tibetan fonts already cover this set of glyphs, and it would be easier for font designers to have a one-to-one mapping between glyph and character than to have to map these presentation forms to sequences of Unicode characters. Well, compared with Mongolian, Tibetan's a doddle ! And if Tibetan gets precomposed forms, then Mongolian can't be far behind. To accept the Chinese proposal would be more than the thin edge of the wedge, it would tear Unicode apart. But I'm sure there's no realistic chance of this happening. Andrew
