[B-Greek] Re: Comparing Unicode fonts

John H. Jenkins jenkins at apple.com
Wed Feb 9 18:44:06 EST 2005


On Feb 9, 2005, at 2:46 AM, Wieland Willker wrote:

>
> But you see, the information (Uncial) is lost. Why do I use an Uncial
> font? To display some specialty of the Uncial. So, a display of some
> minuscule font is of no value.
>

This is a problem which Unicode is expressly designed *not* to solve.  
Unicode is a "plain text" encoding, intended to capture "minimal 
legibility."  The goal is to make sure that the text can continue to be 
read, even in the complete absence of formatting information such as 
typeface, point-size, and so on.

German set in fraktur can still be read if the type is set to Roman, 
and Greek set in uncial can still be read if set in miniscule.  
Naturally, plain text without any formatting cannot carry as much 
information as rich text with it (hence Internet hacks like *this*), 
but it's still better than the pre-Unicode world.  In the pre-Unicode 
world, if formatting information is lost, the result is likely to be 
complete garbage.  In the Unicode world, at least the basic message can 
still be read.






More information about the B-Greek mailing list