font-encoded hacks

Andrew Cunningham lang.support at gmail.com
Fri Oct 7 16:35:58 CDT 2016


HI Neil,

I tend to prefer refering to them as Pseudo-Unicode solutions, rather than
hacked fonts or adhoc fonts, and differentiating them from legacy or 8-bit
solutions.

My preferred approach would to be to treat them as a separate encoding. But
I doubt that will likely happen.

It doesn't help that a mobile devices I purchase in Australia will ship
with a Unicode font installed, but the same device and model, may ship with
a non-Unicode font installed in Myanmar and potentially other parts of SE
Asia.

Andrew

On 7 Oct 2016 22:04, "Neil Harris" <neil at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:

> On 07/10/16 07:42, Denis Jacquerye wrote:
>
>> In may case people resort to these hacks because it is an easier short
>> term
>> solution. All they have to do is use a specific font. They don't have to
>> switch or find and install a keyboard layout and they don't have to
>> upgrade
>> to an OS that supports their script with Unicode properly. Because of
>> these
>> sort term solutions it's hard for a switch to Unicode to gain proper
>> momentum. Unfortunately, not everybody sees the long term benefit, or
>> often
>> they see it but cannot do it practically.
>>
>> Too often Unicode compliant fonts or keyboard layouts have been lacking or
>> at least have taken much longer to be implemented.
>> One could wonder if a technical group for keyboards layouts would help
>> this
>> process.
>>
>
> What might also help is a reconceptualization of these hacks as being in
> effect non-standard character encodings: the existing software
> infrastructure for handling charsets could then be co-opted to convert them
> to (and possibly from) Unicode if desired.
>
> Neil
>
>
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