Fonts and Unicode conformance (was Re: Use of tag ,,,)

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 5/8/24 17:46, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
>
> Years ago, IIRC, John Hudson postulated on an OpenType forum that an 
> OpenType font could be designed to substitute innocuous words for 
> swear words.  So, for example, if a dog lover developed a font that 
> would replace the string "cat " with the string "dog " in the display, 
> would that be considered non-conformant?  (Keeping in mind that the 
> font display doesn't alter the underlying encoded text and cannot 
> affect interchange and storage.)

https://www.thepolitetype.com/

> Or suppose a font developer named Zebediah Waldo Jablonsky set up an 
> OpenType font to display a monogram any time his initials appeared in 
> all-caps.  Or if a business set up an OpenType font to display its 
> logo whenever a string like COMET plus CIRCUMFLEX appeared in the 
> text.  Would either of those fonts be viewed as non-conformant?
>
> An OpenType font could theoretically be set up to display an aardvark 
> glyph for any text string, even for the string <img 
> src="aardvark.jpg"> .  Why would a browser program displaying an image 
> for that string be conformant, yet a font program doing the same thing 
> be non-conformant?  (I'm not saying it wouldn't be silly to do so.)

I regularly (amuse myself and) make fonts render "www" as a ligature, etc.

~mark