On Wed, 1 Aug 2012, Ulrike Fischer wrote: > Perhaps (the discussion is rather long). But you obviously don't > accept my conclusion that one possible solution is to reduce the > complexity of the script. You are only looking for the people who > should write all this complex code.
Language is inherently political, and telling people to change their language to suit the computer is really asking for trouble. However, something that might fly better and addresses similar issues would be to say: requiring the typesetting system to build in per-script support is a losing game because it requires the builders of the typesetting system (who will be experts on computing, not on ALL the scripts of the world) to learn ALL the scripts of the world. It's also a political problem because some scripts, or some forms of some scripts, inevitably won't make the list of "all" scripts and will be disenfranchised as a result. So: this per-script knowledge should be moved from the typesetting system to the font, and then it becomes the responsibility of the font designers who more reasonably can be expected to be experts on their own scripts, and then nobody needs to be an expert on ALL scripts, and unforeseen scripts can be easily added just by creating new fonts. That is the line of thinking that would favour Graphite (a general system for defining complex scripts inside fonts) over OpenType (which requires each script to be defined in the typesetting system, outside of the font), and it should be acceptable both to people who want the technology to be easy to build and to people who want the output to look right. -- Matthew Skala msk...@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca People before principles. http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
