O/T : linux: can I list which small caps are in a ttf/otf font ?

Don Hosek don.hosek at gmail.com
Thu Nov 2 18:43:32 CET 2023


 On Nov 2, 2023 at 12:11:51, Ken Moffat via tex-live <tex-live at tug.org>
wrote:

> In Small Caps, there are some fonts where
> latin i and dotless i both lack a dot, making the small caps useless
> in e.g. turkish.
>

Not necessarily: I would encode all Turkish text using ı and ı̇ (the latter
being 0x0131+0x0307 rather than 0x69). (I would note that the
recommendation for case-folding is to case fold on text in NFD form which,
unfortunately, won’t automatically transform 0x69 to 0x0131+0x0307 since
normalization is not language dependent, but Unicode stability means this
will never change and software may need to enage in some manual string
manipulation for Turkic languages).

Small caps are handled through glyph substitution (yes, there are code
points for 25 of the 26 latin letters scattered through IPA extensions,
phonetic extensions and Latin extended-D, but those should not be used as
small caps directly as they greatly impair accessibility) and knowing
whether a small caps i should be rendered as I or İ would require
knowledge of the language that most software would not have). The lack of a
semantically distinct i-with-dot for those languages that have the pairs
I/ı and  İ/i is a weakness in Unicode that often shows up in surprising
places (e.g., older versions of PHP which break when the language is
Turkish thanks to language-specific case-folding being applied to
identifiers, just one of many bad design choices in that language).

-dh
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