My Unicode Character Set has no ITALIC EXCLAMATION MARK.
How does it store /prog/ in plain text?
Terrible!
Name:
Anonymous2012-05-28 5:12
>>http://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html Q: Wouldn't it have made more sense to simply have introduced a few new combining characters in Plane 0, such as: “make bold”, “make italic”, “make script”, “make fraktur”, “make double-struck”, “make sans serif”, “make monospace” and “make tag”? A: This would have achieved the same effect (and with the same space requirements too, at least for things like “bold uppercase A” in UTF-16). One could have also made other characters bold too, or create combinations of the attributes not currently represented.
However, it would have provided too much flexibility at the character encoding level and would have duplicated, and therefore conflicted with, some of the features present in proper markup languages such as SGML/HTML/XML.
????????????????????????????????!
Name:
Anonymous2012-05-28 9:11
And what about the missing dedicated codes for single and double storey a and g.
Name:
Anonymous2012-05-28 9:23
>>3
Unicode's stance on variant characters is that it's up to the text renderer to choose which glyph to use. IMO that's a stupid idea; they should have used combining characters and ignored markup languages.
Variation sequences exist but they're placed after what they modify, which is stupid from a performance and simplicity point of view. I don't even know if such sequence exist for single and double story ‘a’ and ‘g’.
Name:
42012-05-28 9:30
Another thing I find stupid is that Unicode ligatures are incomplete because they only exist for compatibility and are deprecated. Unicode recommend that ligatures be handled by the renderer, but for optimal output it should use a dictionary of words where ligatures actually hinder readability such as “selfish” or “aloofly”. This is also bad for performance.
With encoded ligatures this problem can be solved offline.
I hate those ``one-and-a-half-story'' `g's that have become trendy among type designers lately. The ones that start like a regular double-story `g', then they cut off before the loop is closed.
I meant in that it allows alternative forms, not that they're the same thing. Though a lot of Unicode developers seem to think it should be a font specification and a markup language and lord knows what else.
And Unicode isn't an encoding either, by the way ;-)