On 1/17/2019 9:35 AM, Marcel Schneider
via Unicode wrote:
This historical summary does not square
in key points with my own recollection (I was there). I would
therefore not rely on it as if gospel truth. In particular, one of the key technologies that brought industry partners to cooperate around Unicode was font technology, in particular the development of the TrueType Standard. I find it not credible that no typographers were part of that project :). Covering existing character sets (National,
International and Industry) was an (not "the") important
goal at the time: such coverage was understood as a necessary
(although not sufficient) condition that would enable data
migration to Unicode as well as enable Unicode-based systems to
process and display non-Unicode data (by conversion). The statement: "there was initially no desire to encode all the languages and scripts" is categorically false. (Incidentally, Unicode does not "encode languages" - no character encoding does). What has some resemblance of truth is that
the understanding of how best to encode whitespace evolved over
time. For a long time, there was a confusion whether spaces of
different width were simply digital representations of various
metal blanks used in hot metal typography to lay out text. As
the placement of these was largely handled by the typesetter,
not the author, it was felt that they would be better modeled by
variable spacing applied mechanically during layout, such as
applying indents or justification. Gradually it became better understood that there was a second use for these: there are situations where some elements of running text have a gap of a specific width between them, such as a figure space, which is better treated like a character under authors or numeric formatting control than something that gets automatically inserted during layout and rendering. Other spaces were found best modeled with a minimal width, subject to expansion during layout if needed.
There is a wide range of typographical quality in printed publication. The late '70s and '80s saw many books published by direct photomechanical reproduction of typescripts. These represent perhaps the bottom end of the quality scale: they did not implement many fine typographical details and their prevalence among technical literature may have impeded the understanding of what character encoding support would be needed for true fine typography. At the same time, Donald Knuth was refining TeX to restore high quality digital typography, initially for mathematics. However, TeX did not have an underlying
character encoding; it was using a completely different model
mediating between source data and final output. (And it did not
know anything about typography for other writing systems). Therefore, it is not surprising that it took a while and a few false starts to get the encoding model correct for space characters. Hopefully, well complete our understanding and resolve the remaining issues. A./
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