Re: Klingon

[Mark E. Shoulson]

No, not because the font uses the PUA.  Non-conformant because the font 
does *NOT* use the PUA.  Lawrence Schoen (who made the font) put the 
Klingon letters as used for tlhIngan-Hol on the uppercase latin letters 
(with some modifications to deal with the digraph and trigraph letters, 
and the two q's), and an older "Klingon alphabet" which was never mapped 
to the sounds of tlhIngan Hol on the lowercase letters, the two versions 
of the numbers on 0-9 and their keyboard-shifted versions respectively, 
and various other symbols on period, comma, etc.  He made the font 
before Unicode was really on the scene much, and even now is 
insufficiently geeky to grok Unicode; he was making a "trick font."

It's incredibly useful, Philippe, to have some inkling of what you're 
talking about before you answer.

~mark

On 01/15/04 10:46, Philippe Verdy wrote:

From: Chris Jacobs
 

WHY THEN DISTRIBUTES THE KLI SUCH A BLATANTLY UNCONFORMANT FONT?
   

You could have said that without vociferating so loudly. (Against the
etiquette, no?)
What is non conforming? The fact that the font uses PUAs? It's not illegal,
just not guaranteed to be interoperable for the long term across all
conforming hosts which may have their own PUA conventions.
So it is used by mutual private agreement between Klingon users, which
accept the fact that their texts encoded with PUAs may not be readable by
everyone as it requires a specific font... This means that these texts are
tightly bound to that font and that this font is to be used within rich-text
documents (HTML, Word, etc...) or can be used to prepare precomposed
documents like PDFs...