Am Montag, den 30.04.2012, 09:29 +0200 schrieb Werner LEMBERG:
> > So, one of the most useful things that could come of the current
> > discussion, would be a thorough documentation of the glyph
> > variations needed to support both English and German for the same
> > quotation mark characters.
"English" and "German" are just two common examples of two groups of
usage. The former also includes Irish, Hebrew, Korean, Portuguese, etc.;
the latter also Bulgarian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, etc.
> For German, it's quite simple: The opening quotes must visibly start
> at the base line and go into the lower left direction; the closing
> quotes must visibly start somewhere at the uppercase glyph height and
> go into the upper right direction.
>
> //
> +---+ xx
> | |
> | |
> xx +---+
> //
In Irish (example!) such an opening mark abused for closing, and
designed accordingly, would "shoot at" the preceding word instead of
leading into the one it helps enclose:
//
+---+ xx +---+
| | | |
instead of
((
+---+ xx +---+
| | | |
Depending on the overall design of the font these marks *may* be
designed to look the same, like MINUS SIGN and EN DASH, for example, but
they *are* not the same. It should be *possible* to provide two distinct
glyphs for them, just as it is possible to provide two different glyphs
for the minus and the en-dash (and the figure dash, and the em-dash, the
hyphen ...) -- and I mean *just as*, without specifying extra
meta-information or (ab?)using some OpenType font feature.
It just makes more sense than giving a code point to a mere glyph
variant (U+201F); or the other way round: If even that has been encoded
already, the RIGHT HIGH 6 should have been before, and if it hasn't, it
should be now.
Michael :-)
