Re: TECH: Fonts (was Re: Various)

On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Charles wrote:

>
> They say: "Not only will your copies fail to reflect
> any corrections or additions which are made here,
> but making copies also fails to respect the legal
> rights of our font vendors."
>
But if I, on the other hand, scan in the pages from their book I'm
pretty sure I'm covered legally. But all glyphs are probably freely
available, too, from sundry sources - problem is that a font composed
from so many sources won't look good.

> But I have some very dumb basic questions:
> How many of these alphabets, syllabaries, etc,
> would work as a series of simply-abutted images?
> HTML supports right-to-left text, at least,
> assuming conversion of gifs to fonts.
> I would even accept monospacing, that's how
> artistically barbaric I am about this.
Everything that doesn't depend on ligatures, accents or the like -
i.e. almost nothing. I don't think I've made a single font without
at least some none-spacing characters.

> If unicode is going to say "let them eat cake",
> we should burn down all their palaces, etc etc.
> Writing schemes were invented by entire cultures,
> not a few font vendors. Unicode should be a solution,
> not just another big problem. </hyperventilation>
>
I think the consortium should provide a reasonably quality complete
reference font for free... That would make it a whole lot more
popular, all those people who say 'I don't need to support unicode,
there aren't even fonts for it', will be silenced, and unicode is
bound to become more popular, meaning more custom for the font
companies...

However, whenever I reboot to windows to fool around with
fonts I can't bring myself to do a few pages of Unicode, even
though that's on my todo-list - I find I prefer to create
fonts for rare scripts like Meroitic or conscripts. (Carlos,
I've already converted your bitmaps to something Scanfont can
read, I only have to make a font out of those now.)

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt