🚀 go-pugleaf

Aandi, thanks for the reply.

It seems as though you are saying that the print engine (Antenna House) should be interpreting these characters and creating the correct spacing and breaking behavior without any glyph in the font. I guess that AH is saying that that is not their job -- we have to find a font with the appropriate glyph, and they will print that glyph. (The fact that changing fonts for this seems to throw off the proper breaking behavior does seem to me to be a bug on the AH side.)

That the font has to supply the glyph seems pretty sensible to me, especially since characters like the thin space are ill-defined (anywhere from 0.25 em to 0.125 em) and you may want to choose the particular rendering of a given font.

I, as a naive user in terms of typography and more particulary PostScript implementation of it, would say that every Unicode character should have a glyph in a font that provides support for that character. Why should spaces be treated in any different way than non-space characters? I want them to work even if I'm just printing the file as a text file. The no-break space has long been treated in this fashion, so why should the others not be? After all, we're only talking about roughly 15 spacing characters.

I realize that most of these spaces expand in certain situations (justification, quadding), and that is part of the print engine's function in terms of padding, but I would say that they all need to have a minimum glyph (even if it is truly minimum -- i.e., zero-width). However, many always have a fixed width for a given font, and it seems to me that particularly in those cases, there should be a glyph for them in a supporting font. Why else would MS Arial Unicode have these glyphs?

The same goes for ligatures -- if they're in Unicode, they should have a glyph in a supporting font. I have read that the Unicode consortium will not accept more ligatures without a very strong case that they are necessary, but that is a different issue -- they are then saying that the creation of those ligatures is a function of the rendering engine. But for any ligatures already in Unicode, it seems to me that there should be a glyph in a supporting font. I don't want to have to rely on PostScript and the vagaries of a particular implementation in order to print the Unicode character that I want.

It may be (as it seems to me from your response) that this was not the expectation of PostScript people (and maybe other rendering technology people) in the past, but that seems to be a perspective from before Unicode. I think that Unicode has (or should have) changed the rules in this regard.

I may be missing the boat on this, but that's the way it seems to me.

Ed Hicks