metric for block coverage

[Adam Borowski via Unicode]

On Sun, Feb 18, 2018 at 12:36:22AM +0000, David Starner wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 3:30 PM Adam Borowski via Unicode <
> unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> > þ or ą count the same as LATIN TURNED CAPITAL
> LETTER SAMPI WITH HORNS AND TAIL WITH SMALL LETTER X WITH CARON.
> 
> þ is in Latin-1, and ą is in Latin-A; the first is essential, even in its
> marginal characters, and the second is pretty consistently useful in the
> modern world. I don't see the problem or solution here; if something
> supports a good chunk of the Arabic block, then it supports Arabic, and if
> you need Persian and it supports Urdu instead, or vice versa, that's no
> comfort.

I probably used a bad example: scripts like Cyrillic (not even Supplement)
include both essential letters and those which are historic only or used by
old folks in a language spoken by 1000, who use Russian (or English...) for
all computer use anyway -- all within one block.

What I'm thinking, is that a beautiful font that covers Russian, Ukrainian,
Serbian, Kazakh, Mongolian cyr, etc., should be recommended to users before
one whose only grace is including every single codepoint.

> Too bad, that wouldn't work for symbols, or for dead scripts: a good runic
> > font will have a complete coverage of elder futhark, anglo-saxon, younger
> > and medieval, while only a completionist would care about franks casket or
> > Tolkien's inventions.
> 
> Where as I might guess that the serious users of Tolkien's runic might
> rival or outnumber the users of the scripts for other purposes; after all,
> Anglo-Saxon and other languages that appeared in Runic all have standard
> Latin orthographies that are more suitable for scholarly purposes.

Hasn't Tolkien moved to Cirth soon after (excuse my ignorance)?


Not sure if I understand your advice right: you're recommending to ignore
all the complexity and going with just raw count of in-block coverage?
This could work: a released font probably has codepoints its author
considers important.


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