🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan22200347@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp> ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp writes:
>In article <1jlngtINNqnk@life.ai.mit.edu> glenn@muesli.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams) writes:
>   Keep in mind that there is no necessary relation between a 16-bit character
>   encoding and a 16-bit font.  One can have a 16-bit character encoding like
>   Unicode (with 20,902 precomposed Han characters, and possibly a collection
>   of combining radical characters) and display with a 16-bit font that
>   contains 2^16 Han glyphs, or even with a 24-bit font, a 32-bit font, etc.
>   The relation of Unicode character code to font code is not defined by the
>   Unicode display model.
>
>Is the last statement understood by many netnews readers, and is it
>shared by UNICODE proponents? I had a vague understanding about this,
>and yet it was a revelation to read such a clear statement.

Just to make thinks more clear still, I will quote from The Unicode Standard,
Volume 1, pp. 12-13, under the section entitled "Glyphs":

  "The Unicode standard was designed to encode characters.  There are
   various relationships between character and glyph: a single glyph may
   correspond to a single character, or to a number of characters, or
   multiple glyphs may result from a single character."

  "Characters reside only in the machine, as srings in memory or on disk, in
   the backing store.  The Unicode standard deals only with character codes.
   In contrast to characters, glyphs appear on the screen or paper as
   particular representations of one or more backing store characters.  A
   repertoire of glyphs comprises a font."

  "Glyph shape and glyph identifier assignments are the responsibility of
   individual font vendors and of the glyph identifier standards."

  "The process of mapping from characters in the backing store to glyphs
   is one aspect of text rendering.  The final appearance of rendered
   text is dependent on context (neighboring characters in the backing
   store), variations in typographic design of the fonts used, and
   formatting information (point size, superscript, subscript, and so on).
   The results on screen or paper can differ considerably from the
   expected or prototypical shape of a letter or character.  The glyph 'A'
   displayed on the screen must not be confused with the character 'A' in
   the backing store."

Glenn Adams