On Monday 7. July 2008 23:45:05 wrote:
> I'm reminded of an related set of proposals I heard back in 2006 at a KDE
> conference.
>
> Tim Eves, at SIL International, gave a presentation on the need to add
> "font feature" and "alternative glyph" support to ODF, in order to better
> support minority languages.
The initial proposal for Alternate glyps on this list came from me, so I think
I should tell you why I suggested it :)
I like explaining things in a usecase, which would help here already.
If I have some text in small-caps (see attached image, second row) you will
notice that the glyphs used for the digits look different from the full caps
ones. The 3 is below the baseline, for example.
Using these old style figures in ODF is currently problematic. They don't have
unique unicode code points and since the advent of openType and fonts with
thousands of glyphs, its no longer feasible to use font name.
In the days that a postscript font could hold just 256 glyphs the solution was
simple; use a different font for the alternate glyphs, but using opentype we
have to use the same font but specify that we want a specific font-feature
for this character.
This is all for latin fonts, things get much more complex for minority fonts,
so I won't explain that here. The simplest is to choose a slashed-zero in
some cases, which is a user choice for the glyph, but manually forcing the
usage of a ligature is another good example.
In my opinion this feature is needed for making that last step from nice
looking text to professional looking text.
--
Thomas Zander
