Re: [9fans] [RFC] fonts and unicode/utf [TeX]

[erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>]

> But I don't want to have the obligation to "know" 65536 signs to
> express what I want to express. I'm sorry, but I think that the
> main majority (remember that for latin1/latin2 accented letters
> are just variants so need less "user memory" than plain different
> characters) can do with (less than) 256 signs blocks, and switch
> fonts when "speaking" about special things (the switch can be
> automatic by the way). As far as TeX is concerned, all the control
> codepoints (positions) are useless in the fonts. There is still
> availbale room even if for the latin1 encoded tfm built for (next)
> kerTeX from PostScript core.

there are currently 0x10ffff+1 codepoints (1114112), not 65536,
but only 23669 + the large chinese blocks are currently defined.

but anyway, i think you are missing the point.  every one of those
codepoints is used, or was used in human written communication.
the fact that you or i probablly don't know them all is beside the
point entirely.

there are 600000 words in the oxford english dictionary.  i don't
know them all.  let's suppose i had the power to eliminate all
the ones that i don't know.  wouldn't that be a horrible idea?
then i would not be able to learn any new words.  odious.

so with unicode.  if you strip out all the languages you don't know
by restricting yourself to the latin1 codepoints [0, 256), then you
can't easily add, say, greek or sumerian codepoints should you or
anyone else need them.

since, as you can see, there is a 1:1 identity mapping between latin1
and unicode codepoints [0, 256), i don't see why one wouldn't
give oneself the option to increase this subset to cover more ground.
i use alphas, arrows, math symbols, etc. quite often in code.  and
even more often when i used to use tex.  it's really quite a drag to
read \alpha instead of “α.”

> Does a whole Unicode "Times-Roman" font makes sense? Ideograms in
> "Times-Roman"?

i get confused on terms.  i think the right term is typeface.
extended fonts collections of a given typeface covering very
wide sections of unicode do exist and are sold by the major
font vendors.

i don't think that it's too hard to imagine that one can make
most symbols look compatable enough.  in fact, i'm using a font
with ~32000 glyphs on my plan 9 terminal right now.

and there's no penalty for having that many glyphs.  it just
means that my font file as a couple hundred subfonts.  these
are only open if needed.  typically only 3 subfonts are open
at any one time.

- erik