Re: Unicode console font

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

To get some ideas for what a Next generation Console Font format could
look like, have a look at the OpenType spec at

  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/opentype.html
  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/opentype/main.htm

Of course we don't want to use OpenType directly, because for the
console we are only interested in simple hand-crafted pixel fonts, but
some of the OpenType metafeatures such as glyph substitution, ligature
definition, and decomposition, combining characters, etc. would be
highly interesting. Especially look at

  http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/opentype/ttochap1.htm

Based on my past experience with the -misc-fixed-* font Unicode
extension, it is very annoying not to have support for decomposed glyphs
in BDF. If in one of the -misc-fixed-* glyphs you change the shape of an
ASCII character, you also have to manually do the same for dozens of
precomposed variants of this base character. This is tedious and leads
easily to an inconsistent font design. It would be much more convenient
if the font that we maintain contained only base characters and
combining characters. The composition of these two should preferably be
done directly before displaying the glyph, because this will lead us to
full Level 3 Unicode support. It is very nice for mathematicians to be
able to place a bar over every Latin letter, etc.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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