[B-Greek] Re: Unicode for typing Greek
James Tauber
jtauber at jtauber.com
Sat Dec 11 01:45:21 EST 2004
On 10/12/04 4:11 PM, "Wieland Willker" <willker at chemie.uni-bremen.de> wrote:
> As I already said, I accept Unicode as a probably superior alternative
> for Greek on websites.
> But else? What will happen to all those Hundreds of beautifully designed
> special fonts? How easily can they be converted into Unicode?
Fairly easily. Converting existing fonts to Unicode is just a matter of
assigning each character to its proper code point in Unicode. When designing
any font, you have to assign each character to a code point. I see no reason
now-a-days that a font designer would assign polytonic Greek characters to
code points other than Unicode.
> I have many documents where these fonts are needed. The correct
> spacings, tabs etc. will only work with these fonts.
> What is the future? Times-Arial-Gentium only?
Unicode isn't about reducing the number of typefaces - it's about reducing
the number of mappings to code points. In fact, Unicode *promotes* the use
of multiple fonts because, with it, fonts are consistent in which character
which maps to which code points so you can more easily change typeface
without having to re-key.
Say someone designs a lovely new polytonic Greek typeface that you want to
use. If it is Unicode, and you've used Unicode in your documents, you can
use the new typeface without having to re-key.
Now, I appreciate that layout sometimes dictates a *particular* typeface is
preferred but even then, the consistency of Unicode provides advantages in
cases like searching for a word in a document that uses multiple typefaces.
> Currently I cannot think of using Unicode. It is just too complicated
> (for me).
In and of itself, Unicode is no more complicated than any other code point
mapping. All fonts have to do the mapping - the only difference with Unicode
fonts is that the code point mapping is consistent.
But I appreciate that if you have a lot of documents that are tied to
proprietary or legacy mappings, the conversion *is* complicated. But if font
designers are doing the right thing providing Unicode versions of their
fonts then there is no reason why *future* documents you produce couldn't
use Unicode just as easily (if not more easily) than other mappings.
James Tauber
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