Re: [9fans] Re: Thai Chicken

[Dave Lukes <davel@anvil.com>]

> What I never understood was why there isn't a "if the character isn't found,
> then look in *this* font" entry.

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!  That way lies TrueType.

While I understand the frustration caused by lack of mappings
for the (types of) languages spoken by the majority of the world's
population, jumping in with a Q+D fix is not the answer.
If you try reading English text that is made up of varying fonts,
you will strain your brain, and while I suspect that this
may be less true with other language types,
it still doesn't sound like a good idea.

> OK, this could recurse, etc horribly (and that would have to be
> avoided somehow),

Fine words ...
So the algorithm for rendering a single character
in a known font becomes what, exactly ...?

What do you do if the other font is fundamentally different?
(size, baseline, aspect ratio ...).

>  but the advantage is that a single font could be
> defined with all the Unicode characters, and made the default for the
> other fonts.

I hate to be language-ist here,
but that solution will probably work fairly well for
ideographic/pictographic languages for various reasons:
* there is probably a very limited set of fonts available
* Those few fonts available probably look surprisingly similar
  due to cultural, sociological and availability constraints.

>  Then every font would be complete,
Beg to differ: they would be complete in the same sense that
Frankenstein's monster was complete.

It's like sticking tractor tyres on a Skyline
(sorry: "fancy fast car" for non-petrol-heads),
and saying "Hey, it's a sports car that can plough fields",
when what we need is an LM-03 (sorry, non-petrolheads).

>  and we wouldn't have had this discussion!!!

Instead we'd be having the discussion about how many levels
of recursion to allow, what to do when that limit gets blown,
where do we put the permitted recursion level in the font header,
... ?

Cheers,
	Dave.

P.S. What Geoff Collyer said, too.