Karl Pentzlin: > > The proposed variation sequences simply provide a more general access to > typographic details, which now can be accomplished by more complicated means > like implementing locale-specific glyph selection within a font, and relying > on a higher-level protocol supplying the correct locale information.
How is selecting and setting once a locale (vulgo language) more complicated than making sure every instance of a letter is accompanied by the appropriate VS? They don’t seem very handy for runs of text, but VS are probably the right tool for reference work, e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabet#Letterforms_and_typography>. So it makes sense to specify combinations. How did you decide what to include in your proposal, though? There are many more variants, even when not taking handwritten forms into account, e.g. ‘u’- or ‘v’-based ‘y’ and ‘w’ or uppercase letters with diacritics above rendered lower so they’re not using more vertical space than the base letters.
