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

Ken Moffat zarniwhoop at ntlworld.com
Fri Nov 3 02:38:53 CET 2023


On Thu, Nov 02, 2023 at 10:43:32AM -0700, Don Hosek wrote:
>  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

Thanks, that is interesting.  Just when I thought I'd got my current
batch of updated PDFs all ready to go :-(

Cheers.

ĸen
-- 
This is magic for grown-ups; it has to be hard because we know there's
no such thing as a free goblin.
   -- Pratchett, Stewart & Cohen - The Science of Discworld II


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