On Mon, Jul 16 2018 at 19:00 +0100, [email protected] writes: > Hi > >> I ask the question because there are now several historical corpora >> of Polish under development, which use at present a kind of fall-back >> or some other ad hoc solutions for "nonce glyphs", as they are called >> in the FAQ. > > I wonder if you could say please what are the "kind of fall-back or > some other ad hoc solutions" please.
I would prefer not to go into details. I think some of those "solutions" are simply wrong but the list is not the right place to criticize them. > The reason I ask is because I have thought of a possible solution to >the problem that has graceful fall-back and uses only plane 0 >characters, no Private Use Area characters at all: I am wondering >whether my suggestion will be of use or if it is just another method >that could just be added to a collection of "kind of fall-back or some >other ad hoc solutions". > My suggestion is to use for each desired glyph a sequence consisting > of three characters, and then have an OpenType font decode them so > that the glyph can be displayed. This is a prohibitive requirement, because for years there is the lack of font creators interested in old Polish. > Each such sequence being of the form. > > Base character ZERO WIDTH JOINER then a circled digit character or a circled > number character. > > http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2460.pdf > > Thus there being up to twenty specific glyphs for each base character. > > The list of glyphs could be gradually extended as needed and if an > attempt to display a newly added glyph is made using a font > implemented from an earlier list then there would be graceful > fall-back to the base character followed by a circled digit. > > It would be helpful for entering text into documents if the ZERO WIDTH > JOINER character has a visible glyph within the font. Then entering > text with OpenType glyph substitution turned off could be easier to > carry out. I perceive your proposal as "visible variant selectors for private variation sequences", as a text encoded this way can be easily converted into a text using real variant selectors. I think it might be a reasonable temporary solution, but not the ultimate one. > I am wondering quite how acceptable such a solution would be for > standardization: the list of ways that something can be encoded using > a ZWJ (ZERO WIDTH JOINER) character seems to have recently been de > facto extended for use with generating emoji sequences - not with > circled digits but use of ZWJ to change meaning which is a far bigger > extension than needed for this suggestion as meaning would often be > unaltered when using this suggestion. I would expect arguments that is has no obvious advantage over variations sequences. Best regards Janusz -- , Janusz S. Bien emeryt (emeritus) https://sites.google.com/view/jsbien
