[squeak-dev] Re: Sq font rendering [was: The future of Squeak & Pharo ... etc]

K. K. Subramaniam subbukk at gmail.com
Tue Jun 30 07:46:54 UTC 2009


On Tuesday 30 Jun 2009 3:09:15 am Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
> At Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:30:31 +0300,
>
> Igor Stasenko wrote:
> > So, do i understood you right: this information (leadingChar) could be
> > useful sometimes.
> > But real world examples showing that its completely useless , at least
> > by now. And often only adds an unnecessary complexity & confusion in
> > handing a text & communicating with world outside the Squeak.
>
>   Well, but Squeak in Chinese/Japanese/Korean have been using it and
> depending on it, so this characterization is not correct.
The essential problem is the encoding of characters (graphemes) which have 
regional or lingual variations. Devanagari also has such examples. The 
grapheme 'a' is rendered differently in Bombay and in Calcutta. Should the 
variations be encoded in the context or in every grapheme codepoint?

leadingChar is just one way to resolve such variations. Personally, I prefer 
handling such variations as part of the context. A grapheme is a notional 
element. We need to encode it so that we can input, calculate, combine, 
compare and sort notional elements. Visual appearance becomes important only 
for manual edit and print operations.

Subbu



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