On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 12:39 PM, Martin J. Dürst <due...@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
.... No, your work wouldn't be impossible. It might be quite a bit more > difficult, but not impossible. I have written papers about Han ideographs > and Japanese text processing where I had to create my own fonts (8-bit, > with mostly random assignments of characters because these were one-off > jobs), or fake things with inline bitmap images (trying to get information > on the final printer resolution and how many black pixels wide a stem or > crossbar would have to be to avoid dropouts, and not being very successful). > > I have heard the argument that some character variant is needed because of > research, history,... quite a few times. If a character has indeed been > historically used in a contrasting way, this is definitely a good argument > for encoding. But if a character just looked somewhat different a few > (hundreds of) years ago, that doesn't make such a good argument. Otherwise, > somebody may want to propose new codepoints for Bodoni and Helvetica,... > I agree with Martin. Moreover, his last paragraphs are getting at the crux of the matter. Unicode is not a registry of glyphs for letters, nor should try to be. Simply because someone used a particular shape at some time to mean a letter doesn't mean that Unicode should encode a letter for that shape. We do not need to capture all of the shapes in https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Gebrochene_Schriften.png simply because somebody is going to "publish a volume full of" those shapes. Mark