fonts for U7.0 scripts

[Asmus Freytag]

Peter is correct.

The only fonts that should be released to the public are those that are 
Unicode encoded and have the correct shaping tables.

Unlike the public, the code chart editors for Unicode have tools that 
can correctly handle not only ASCII-hacked fonts as well as PUA-assigned 
fonts, but also fonts that use the "wrong" Unicode encoding (because 
they were designed for an earlier draft with different code point 
assignments). These tools ignore all shaping tables, so the lack of such 
tables isn't an issue.

The documents created by the code charts editors are no editable in the 
normal sense, so they can be published without causing problems, like 
establishing a de-facto encoding. They don't contain running text in 
these fonts, so there isn't an issue with search - the searchable 
contents are all character names, annotations etc in Latin letters and 
digits.

Releasing such fonts to the public would establish a de-facto 
non-sanctioned encoding, because people could create (and interchange) 
running text using them.

A./

On 10/23/2014 6:02 PM, Peter Constable wrote:
>
> Sure: People find a font that isn’t a truly functional, 
> Unicode-conformant font for script X and…
>
> -They try using it, find it doesn’t display text as expected, and 
> conclude that Unicode doesn’t work for their script
>
> -The font has glyphs mapped from ASCII characters; they try typing and 
> it seems to display their text as desired, so they start generating 
> content. Now we have data interop problems.
>
> -The font kinda works, but not perfectly. They decide that they can 
> fix it by just changing some of the glyphs to certain presentation 
> forms and by adding certain other glyphs on some unused code 
> positions. Then they start generating content. Now we have data 
> interop problems.
>
> The last scenario is really similar to the serious problems we have 
> now for Myanmar. Iow, this isn’t just hypothetical.
>
> Peter
>
> *From:*Shriramana Sharma [mailto:samjnaa at gmail.com]
> *Sent:* Thursday, October 23, 2014 4:48 PM
> *To:* Peter Constable
> *Cc:* Andrew West; Andrew Glass (WINDOWS); Unicode Public
> *Subject:* Re: fonts for U7.0 scripts
>
> On Thursday, October 23, 2014, Peter Constable <petercon at microsoft.com 
> <mailto:petercon at microsoft.com>> wrote:
>
>     . But publishing fonts created for the purpose of chart production
>     may lead to all kinds of problems if they are not truly
>     functional, Unicode-conformant fonts -
>
> Dear Peter,
>
> Can you clarify what "all kinds of problems" you foresee?
>
>
>
> -- 
> Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Unicode mailing list
> Unicode at unicode.org
> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20141023/6beee456/attachment.html>