[XeTeX] The future of XeTeX

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/8/1  <mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>:
> 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.
>
That's right but we still have a lot of non-Graphite fonts.
> --
> Matthew Skala
> mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                 People before principles.
> http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz