Re: Combining German Umlauts and Russian Cyrillic characters

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Tue, Nov 25, 1997 at 09:37:48AM -0500, Chris Herborth wrote:

> > So we need to study prospects of adopting some more sophisticated FSS
> > for Lout, may be similar to LaTeX's NFSS. 
> 
> As long as we don't adopt NFSS specifically;

Agreed.  I just used NFSS a widely known example.  LaTeX is for guys
with strong stomach...

X Logical Font Description (XLFD) is another widely known FSS example.


> > Either a single font with all the necessary glyphs
> > can be used by swapping encoding vector on the fly or preparating
> > several reencoded fonts that share glyphs but has proper encoding
> > vectors, or several distinct fonts each of which has a subset of
> > necessary glyphs (say for eastern latin, for western latin and for
> > cyrillic) can be used.
> 
> The "several distinc fonts" route seems like the best to me; it doesn't
> require any modifications, and gives us a lot of flexibility.  On the
> other hand, it'll also require some work to get a good mapping set up.

Actually it doesn't matter if the font has all the glyphs for Latin
and Cyrillic and added characters or separate fonts are used.  When we
set the encoding vector the only thing we have to know is that the
font has all the glyphs we list in the encoding vector.  So we can map
cyrillic character block into font A with evec CyrEnc and latin block
into font B with evec LatinEnc (it may be EBCDIC, it doesn't matter
:), but A and B may be the same font as well as different fonts.  No
difference.  It's just in real life we usually have a series of Times
fonts for Latin1, Latin2, etc...

> > Thus we will need some way to desribe a mapping from character codes
> > in some coded set into pairs of set of glyphs (font is a set glyph +
> > encoding vector) with character codes in another coded set (encoding
> > vector proper).
> 
> Maybe some sort of logical font groupings; serif, sans-serif,
> monospaced, and each has a range of Unicode characters that map onto a
> font and 8-bit value in that font...

Yes, something like this.  I haven't studied the advances in foundry
bussiness, but AFAIK there're already schemes for font groupings and
font substitutions (doesn't Acrobat use one?).  Provisions for more
refined style distinction are desirable to distinguish say gothic
letterforms and plain, church-slavonic and mundane, tibetan u-chan and
u-me etc.  And, of course, sophisticated ligature handling is required
to support alphabets like arabic, indic (devanagari and related
scripts), tibetan etc.

We can use experience of Omega (Unicode TeX) project.

    http://www.ens.fr/omega/

 
SY, Uwe
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