On 16/03/2004 07:35, Carl W. Brown wrote:
...It has the disadvantage of making these fonts useless for Turkish and Azeri, and more fundamentally so than fonts which have <f,i> ligatures with no visible dot. And of course the fonts would not be acceptable to most users of English and other Latin script languages. So any such font will be restricted to a small niche market.
I suspect that just changing the font to eliminate the dot will be easier.
Software won't have to be changed, existing code pages will not have to be
changed, searches will work, etc.
You say that like it's a bad thing...
Of course Celtic uncial fonts will have appeal only to a limited market. But you shouldn't have to respell your words when the font changes (as you would if Irish went to dotless-i, since when printed in conventional fonts, it does have a dot on its i). We're after a particular look here, and so a particular font. That font has limited appeal? So does the look we're after. Someone who wants to write Turkish in Irish-looking uncials will have to come up with his own clever font that manages to have dotted and dotless i's and still look okay.
On the other hand, the change to Unicode required for Irish to use dotless i would be rather trivial, simply adding Irish to the existing list currently consisting of Turkish and Azeri, to which Tatar, Bashkir, Gagauz, Karakalpak and various minority languages of Azerbaijan should also be added.
Yeah, but then your spelling would be wrong every time you decided to print in Times Roman instead of Celtic Pride Bold.
~mark
