Encoding italic

[Kent Karlsson via Unicode]

Den 2019-02-10 16:31, skrev "James Kass via Unicode" <unicode at unicode.org>:

> 
> Philippe Verdy wrote,
> 
>>> ...[one font file having both italic and roman]...

For OpenType fonts, there is a "design axis" called "ital". Value 0 on that
axis would be roman (upright, normally), and value 1 on that axis would be
italic. I don't know to what extent that is available in OpenType fonts in
common use... (Instead of using two separate font files.)

[math chars]
> They were encoded for interoperability and round-tripping because they
> existed in character sets such as STIX. 

They were basically requested "by" STIX, yes. Not sure about the
round-tripping bit.

> They remain Latin letter form
> variants.  If they had been encoded as the variant forms which
> constitute their essential identity it would have broken the character
> vs. glyph encoding model of that era.  Arguing that they must not be
> used other than for scientific purposes

I don't think that particular argument was made, IIUC.

> is just so much semantic
> quibbling in order to justify their encoding.
> 
> Suppose we started using the double struck ASCII variants on this list
> in order to note Unicode character numbers such as ��+�������� or
> ��+��������? 

That particular example would be ok (event though outside of a
conventional math formula). But we were talking about natural
languages in their conventional orthography, using italics/bold.

/Kent K